In Washington, 300 Shoes Tied to Memories

Chiharu Shiota's 'Dialogue From DNA' in Krakow, Poland in 2004.

When you lose loved ones, what do you do with their shoes? Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has built an international reputation exploring issues of memory, loss and the totemic power that people can give to everyday objects like shoes and keys.

Ms. Shiota will represent Japan at next year's Venice Biennale, but art lovers in Washington will get an early chance to see one of her elaborate shoe installations at a show opening Aug. 30 at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

For "Perspectives: Chiharu Shiota," the artist has amassed at least 300 donated shoes—along with handwritten notes from each donor confiding a personal memory. Some donated their deceased parents' shoes; others donated high heels worn for milestones like weddings or music recitals. One wheelchair-bound donor gave the artist a pair that he intended to wear once he started walking again—only he never did.

Ms. Shiota, in a Tuesday interview, said that she plans to splay these shoes across a gallery near the museum's entrance. She will then spend several days using 4 miles of red yarn to link the shoes and thread the resulting spidery web to a single, dangling hook overhead. The mesh aims to illustrate the emotional heft of these objects, even though they are no longer worn, she said.

The artist with her 2012 installation 'Stairway.'  

Ms. Shiota said that she came up with the idea of using shoes when she left Japan in 1996 to study art in Germany. At first, her return visits felt comforting and familiar, but as the years passed, she felt an increasingly uneasy sense of in-betweenness, with neither place feeling like home. "I felt this gap in my imagination that reminded me of trying on old shoes," she said. "They fit, but they don't fit me anymore."

Curator Carol Huh said that she has had English translations done—accessible at a kiosk installed nearby or online—for many of the notes attached to the shoes. Visitors also can watch Ms. Shiota as she strings the piece together between Monday and Wednesday, adding a performance element that has also long been part of Ms. Shiota's work.

The artist's signature material is yarn, dyed red or black. Growing up in Osaka, Ms. Shiota said, she could draw anything that she could imagine and quickly tired of the effort. In college, she began experimenting with string installations in order to "make drawings in the air." By the time she moved to Germany, she was encapsulating entire rooms in ornate webs, sometimes with desks or beds or nightgowns seemingly suspended in midair.

"String can sag, connect or loosen," she added. "It has so many human qualities; it has tension."

Like the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Ms. Shiota uses string and other textiles to create her womb-like installations, but Ms. Huh said that Ms. Shiota rarely chronicles her own private memories, preferring to channel more universal feelings of loss and remembrance. One exception: As a child, the artist's neighbor suffered a house fire, and Ms. Shiota was mesmerized by the charred piano the neighbor later carried to the trash. She evoked this memory in a 2002 piece shown first at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in which she set fire to a broken, century-old piano and later covered it with string. Ms. Shiota said that she was struck by the image of an object that looked like a piano but could no longer be played.

More recently, Ms. Shiota has started compiling other objects tossed aside by her neighbors in Berlin, where she now lives. These include 2,000 wooden window frames that she has reconfigured into see-through chambers and Babel-like towers. Next up: keys. For the Venice Biennale, she's amassing 50,000 of them. "If you have a key in your hand, you have a chance," she said. "You have access."