The biggest solo exhibition ever staged by renowned Japanese contemporary artist Chiharu Shiota is opening in Brisbane.
"The Soul Trembles" explores 25 years of the artist's work, including large scale installations, sculpture, and video performance at the Gallery of Modern Art.
Among her best known works in the show is Uncertain Journey 2016/2019, a room-sized installation of large metal boats tied with thousands of strands of red wool.
The threads rise up to form a vast glowing network of caverns and arches, symbolising the uncertainty of life.
It's an idea that took on fresh resonance for the artist in 2016, when her ovarian cancer returned while she was putting the exhibition together.
"How can I survive if my body dies? And where is my soul going, my thinking and feeling, where is it going?" she said.
"I never thought, my body is going to die, I was surprised," she told AAP.
The experience led Shiota to create a series of new artworks for the show, including video installations and works in a new medium, glass.
Gallery-goers will also see a set of video screens, showing 10-year-old children answering some of the profound questions that characterise Shiota's art.
Among them, what is a soul?
"The soul is like a home," one child said.
"When it leaves us, maybe it is visiting other people and it becomes a memory," said another.
According to the show's curator Mami Kataoka, Shiota's art speaks to everyone regardless of where they are from, because it tackles the fundamental question of being human.
"Chiharu is one of the few, the handful of artists who can do that," the Director of the Mori Art Museum told AAP.
Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota studied painting in Osaka and has worked in Berlin for the past 26 years.
But travelling in Australia and studying painting at the Canberra School of Art in the 1990s had a formative influence on her work.
While in Australia, Shiota decided to leave painting behind, to work on the performance art and installations she is now renowned for.
The exhibition opens Saturday and continues at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until October 3.
