I am trying to affect the visitor’s imagination by showing aspects of the unseen or unconscious. I try to push their imagination, to make it take flight.
Tabaimo, in interview with Rachel Kent, Tokyo, December 9, 2013, cited in Kent, “Unquiet Waters: Tabaimo,” essay written on the occasion of Tabaimo: MEKURUMEKU, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, July 2–September 7, 2014, available at mca.com.au/stories-and-ideas/unquiet-waters-tabaimo-curatorial-essay/.
Born in 1975 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, Tabaimo (Ayako Tabata) describes her generation as standing on unstable ground.1 The daughter of traditional ceramicist Shion Tabata, Tabaimo graduated from Kyoto University of Art and Design in 1999 on the tail end of the so-called “lost decade”—a period of major economic stagnation in Japan. While her parents’ generation is credited with achieving Japan’s economic and technological success after World War II, the generation born during the 1970s is characterized by individualism and isolation.2 As Tabaimo explained, “even though we are the protagonists in our own real world, we have absolutely no response to what is occurring right before our eyes.”3 While other artists of her generation, like Takashi Murakami, invoke kawaii—the cute culture that dominates Japanese popular imagery—Tabaimo takes a radical shift. Animating everyday events and tragedies from the news, she focuses on Japanese society with a realism that is uncharacteristic of Japanese art.4
Tabaimo, interview by Susan Sollins for “Boundaries,” in Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century 6 (New York: Art21, 2012), 112. ↩︎
Ashley Rawlings, “Tabaimo: All That Creeps Beneath the Surface,” ArtAsiaPacific 71 (November/December 2010): 100. ↩︎
Tabaimo, in Ivan Vartanian, Drop Dead Cute: The New Generation of Women Artists in Japan (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005), 145. ↩︎
Carol Kino, “Cutting Through Cute to the Real Japan,” The New York Times, October 13, 2011. ↩︎
In her fantastical room-sized video animations, Tabaimo probes the depths of the unconscious and gives shape to the uncertainties that haunt contemporary experience. For dolefullhouse (2007) she merged the miniature and the natural to create an utterly bizarre world: a doll house represents a Japanese body invaded by Western culture, symbolized by bourgeois furnishings and the limbs of an octopus. In the video disembodied hands arrange rooms in an intimate, comfortable Western style until flailing tentacles assault the home like a virus invading a body, triggering a frightening physicality of veins pulsating to the sound of a heartbeat. The hands grow restless, scratching themselves and then the walls of the house, upending its contents in the process. Eventually, a water leak turns into a flood, exposing the “guts” of the home—a heart and brain. The flooded house is a metaphor for the complexities of maintaining Japanese identity in an increasingly global society, and water is a common theme in Tabaimo’s work—as the artist explained, “the coming and going of water is a way of envisioning a world beyond this one.”1
Tabaimo, in “Boundaries,” season 6 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Art21, 2012), DVD. ↩︎
Tabaimo’s computer-animated works bridge Japanese tradition and modernity. Starting with hundreds or even thousands of manga-like line drawings made with calligraphy pens, her soft shading and coloration recall that of ukiyo-e woodblock prints.1 Indeed, her early influences include authors of the horror manga genre, Junji Ito and Kazuo Umeda, and the discovery of a book of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai (1760–1849).2 Tabaimo’s drawings are scanned into digital files and animated with computer software. The process—aided by the artist’s studio assistant: her younger sister, Imoimo— involves combining discrete drawings into a single image, then sequencing those images on timelines to create animations projected onto setlike screens in immersive, often panoramic installations.
Tabaimo focuses on the anxieties lurking beneath the surface of everyday life in her country to uncover a darker world behind Japanese society. She projects her alluring, room-sized animations of typical urban communal and private spaces—public bathhouses and restrooms, crowded trains, cramped apartment dwellings—onto complex architectural configurations that the artist builds as part of her installations. Seemingly mundane situations unfold from these stagelike structures and morph into absurd, even grotesque, narratives. Ordinary interiors mutate, isolated body parts perform tasks, and violence erupts. Tabaimo: Her Room (2016) at the San José Museum of Art, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, featured three video animations—danDAN (2009), yudangami (2009), and aitaisei-josei (2015)—a body of work focused on the artist’s own anxieties about modern life that reveal her innermost thoughts on selfhood—along with eighteen scroll-like ink drawings and a site-specific installation of wall drawings.
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