Artsy has published a feature by Annabel Keenan on Chiharu Shiota, the Japanese artist known for site-specific installations in which she weaves enormous webs of black, white or red yarn, turning entire galleries into labyrinthine environments. The piece considers her work as the touring retrospective 'The Soul Trembles' continues its travels, illustrated with installation views photographed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Two works anchor the reflection. 'In Silence' (2002/2026) fills a room with black thread, casting deep shadows over a charred piano and chairs caught in the matrix. It reaches back to Shiota's childhood: at nine, she watched a neighbour's house catch fire, and the scorched piano left outside afterwards struck her as more beautiful than it had been before the flames. 'Uncertain Journey' (2016/2026) sends a dense matrix of red thread flowing through a large gallery, with several large metal boats connected to the web – boats being an object Shiota returns to as an emblem of immigration, displacement and the broader journey of life. Visitors walk through and beneath the installation, their presence activating the work. Running through the feature is Shiota's longstanding preoccupation with memory and existence in absence: an empty room, she suggests, can still hold presence, carrying the trace of someone who lived there without ever having been met. The article also recalls her landmark presentations – 'The Key in the Hand' at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where she represented Japan with more than 50,000 keys dangling from an expansive red web above two wooden boats; 'Lost Words' (2017), which suspended thousands of torn Bible pages in a hundred languages inside Berlin's oldest church; and 'Counting Memories' (2019), where paper numerals drifted through dark thread. Her institutional exhibitions have included the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the SCAD Museum of Art, and her auction record stands at 287,500 pounds at Christie's in 2021.