Tabaimo. Japan Inside Out
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. ↩︎