The Soul Trembles
The new major retrospective dedicated to Chiharu Shiota at the MAO in Turin is a profoundly evocative experience—a journey into the invisible fold of the soul that transforms the exhibition space into an emotional landscape of rare intensity. The very title, The Soul Trembles, suggests an inner motion, a tremor of being that transcends form and visibility: an invitation to confront human fragility, memory, and that emptiness that becomes presence.
Curated by Mami Kataoka (Director of the Mori Art Museum) and Davide Quadrio, with the support of Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti, the exhibition retraces over twenty years of Shiota’s artistic practice through drawings, photographs, sculptures, and some of her most powerful environmental installations.
Reviewed by Beatrice
20. November 2025
One of the most striking aspects is the way the artist uses threads—red and black—to weave metaphorical networks that embody invisible bonds. These suspended, enveloping webs function almost like the nervous system of each installation: they define pathways of loss and hope, mark the fragile weave of memory, and evoke solitudes that meet.
At MAO, several iconic works acquire a new resonance precisely because the museum itself seems to enter into dialogue with the spiritual intimacy of Shiota’s work. According to director Quadrio, The Soul Trembles offers visitors an “inner, liberating, and shared journey.” In this context, what appears on the surface—hanging suitcases, skeletal boats, old everyday objects—becomes a tangible manifestation of interior life. The accumulation of swaying suitcases evokes the constant migration of identity, the weight of the memories we carry as though they were the luggage of the soul.
Works such as Where Are We Going? (2017) and Uncertain Journey (2016) epitomize this dialectic: the boat becomes a symbol of travel—not only geographical but existential—while the red thread structures circumscribe space as if trying to hold not the object itself but the emotion, desire, and fear of the unknown. At the same time, installations like In Silence, with its burned piano shrouded in black threads and silent chairs, evoke a theater of absence, a stage on which even time falls quiet, leaving room for the suspended breath of memory.
From a philosophical perspective, the exhibition becomes an exploration of being as a relational fabric: Shiota seems to suggest that our identity is never solid, but always interwoven with others, with the past, with the things we have lost or left behind. The installation thus becomes a cosmic metaphor of an inner universe in constant expansion and contraction—a place where the visible is only the surface of an emotional abyss.
Aesthetically, the contrast between vibrant red and oppressive black is never gratuitous: it is a dance of tensions, a dialogue between life and death, hope and anguish, presence and absence. The monumental installations are not mere artworks; they become existential scenographies, spiritual environments in which visitors are invited not only to observe but to feel themselves part of the work.
In existential terms, the exhibition offers a form of catharsis: to enter these networks is also to embrace one’s own vulnerability, to reflect on one’s trajectory, to acknowledge that our inner suitcases—traumas, memories, dreams—form the tight weave in which we are continually suspended. It is an experience that not only moves but transforms, urging viewers to elaborate their own relationship with passing time, with loss, and with connection.
Finally, the fact that this exhibition arrives in Italy for the first time—and for the first time ever in an Asian art museum—gives the curatorial gesture an additional significance: it is not only a tribute to an internationally renowned artist but also an opportunity to reflect on how culture and art can weave bridges between worlds, between inner landscapes, between profoundly different sensibilities.
The Soul Trembles at MAO is a visual and spiritual poem, an invitation to silence and meditation. It is an experience that leaves an echo—a lingering tremor that persists long after one has left the gallery. An exhibition that does not merely display but penetrates, touches, connects—an authentic manifestation of art as existential experience.
