Tabaimo. Tabaimo: Her Room
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.