Uncertain Journey

For someone facing a lot of existential questions, the Chiharu Shiota exhibit at the Grand Palais is a fitting place to wander around in. A freezing cold winter day makes the experience of walking through rooms swathed end to end in string even more visceral. Shiota was diagnosed with cancer at the same time she was asked to prepare a retrospective of her 30-year career, and her works reflect this. Bright red string, like veins; black ones, like smoke. Here, you’ll see the skeletons of boats cradling balls of angry red string that seemingly want to pull them up to the sky — Uncertain Journey, it’s called, and you’ve never been more certain in your life that you know where all this is heading. It looks like blood, someone murmurs beside you in passing, and silently you agree.

In the next room, burnt chairs and a charred piano peek faintly out of a cloud of black string. There’s nothing wispy about this, and its heaviness is overwhelming, the complete opposite of the flighty boat-tugging red mass in the previous room. You find it hard to maintain a poker face as you dodge the crowds and find your way toward the last room where suitcases dangle from the ceiling, some of them jerking in the air from the motorized contraptions hidden within them.

This body of work, called Searching for the Destination, breaks down the stoic armor behind which you’ve shielded yourself, and you briefly allow yourself to feel fear and doubt, something you’ve come to indulge in from time to time, stealthily, and always with guilty jolts of morbid pleasure at the absurdity of it all. Because you feel like it isn’t happening to you but to someone like you in some parallel universe (That poor little fucker, you think, I’m glad I’m not her.)

You saw this exhibit in Shanghai’s Long Museum, years ago when you lived in China, a life you loved for as long as you had it; and under different circumstances the exhibition was inspiring and trippy and astonishing. Now, you walk slowly out of the museum feeling threatened. Was it a warning, after all? Funny how you interpret things depending on where you are in the trajectory. It’s a threat, you decide, of things to come and overcome. It was a carousel before and a haunted train ride today. You willingly paid for it. Not all rides are fun. And as you walk back home in the cold, your soul— just like the exhibition’s name—trembles.

Currently listening to:
Bill Callahan
I Wish We Were an Eagle

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