Drawing With Thread: Chiharu Shiota’s Soul Trembles Hits North America

Some artists paint with brushes. Chiharu Shiota paints with kilometers of yarn and the kind of patience that makes your shoulders ache just looking at it.

The Soul Trembles is on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from September 26, 2026 to February 14, 2027. The MMFA calls it the largest solo exhibition to date of the Berlin-based Japanese artist, and Montreal is the first North American stop on a tour that premiered at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum in 2019 and has already traveled through multiple cities worldwide.

Thread as architecture (and emotion)

Shiota is known for immersive installations in red, black, or white thread. The museum describes her process as drawing in space: weaving and intertwining webs by hand, in situ, in a performative, repetitive, meditative way. Each remake is a rebirth. Impermanence is not a side note. It is the plot.

Montreal’s presentation includes monumental works such as *Where Are We Going?* (2017/2026), *Uncertain Journey* (2016/2026), and *In Silence* (2002/2026), plus sculptures, performance videos, photographs, drawings, and documentation of her stage designs for dance, theater, and opera.

The subtitle *The Soul Trembles* is not decorative. Shiota wants emotional responses strong enough to stir the soul. Her work often grows from personal experience, including facing mortality after cancer diagnoses, then opens outward into memory, connection, anxiety, resilience, dreams, existence, and silence. Private origin, public invitation.

Who organized it

The exhibition is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. It is curated by Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum, with Iris Amizlev, Curator of Special Projects at the MMFA, responsible for the Montreal presentation. MMFA Director Stéphane Aquin, quoted in the museum’s July 9, 2026 press materials circulated via Artforum Artguide, talks about dreamlike journeys through memory and time, and about the universality underneath the technical wow factor.

Why I am buzzing about this

If you have ever stood under a Shiota web, you know the feeling: half cathedral, half nervous system. For an artsy community blog, this is a reminder that “drawing” does not have to stay on paper. Sometimes the line becomes a room you walk through. Montrealers, this is your season. Everyone else, put it on the travel vision board next to the poutine.

Primary source: MMFA exhibition page