The Asian Art Museum’s exhibition Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries closes on Monday, July 27, 2026. The show is the first solo museum presentation in the Bay Area by Shiota, a Japanese artist known for room-filling installations built from densely woven colored thread.
Two Home Countries opened April 3 and occupies the museum’s Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, its largest special-exhibition gallery. It gathers work from across Shiota’s career, including installation, sculpture, video, drawing, and stage design.
What’s on view
The centerpiece, Diary, stretches strands of red yarn across the 88-foot length of the pavilion. Suspended overhead are handwritten pages from the journals of Japanese soldiers and postwar German civilians. «In Diary, the voices of individuals who never met are brought into conversation,» says Dr. Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator. «The installation makes history feel personal, fragmented, and profoundly present.»
The title installation, Two Home Countries, uses a red dress that unravels into cascading red cords filling the metal frames of two houses. Later sections include Shiota’s concept drawings for KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a stage production she designed for the Japan Society in New York, along with sculptures, performance videos, and works on paper.
About the artist
Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 and has lived and worked in Berlin since the mid-1990s. The exhibition’s theme of two home countries refers to Japan and Germany, and to what she calls the «in-between» experience of a bicultural life. The show was organized by Japan Society, New York, and curated by Michele Bambling.
If you go
The Asian Art Museum is at 200 Larkin Street in the Civic Center, near the Civic Center/UN Plaza BART and Muni Metro station. Current hours are Thursday 1 to 8 p.m. and Friday through Monday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the museum closed Tuesday and Wednesday. A special-exhibition ticket is required in addition to general admission. For low-cost options this month, see our guide to free museum days in San Francisco for July 2026, or our overview of the city’s major museum collections.
Exhibition dates and details are from the Asian Art Museum, with additional coverage from The Brooklyn Rail.
Photo: InSapphoWeTrust, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
