New Stories from the Edge of Asia: Tabaimo: Her Room

Exhibition Website

Feb 6 2016 - Aug 21 2016

Imagine these ever-changing environments: Apartment buildings open to reveal the very private and sometimes strange lives of their occupants; behind a curtain of long, flowing dark hair, arteries feed blood to a pulsating heart and a throbbing brain slips off the edge of a table; a hanging lamp morphs into a full moon, which morphs into a manhole that swallows the contents of the room.

Tabaimo dissolves the ordinary, material world and blurs the distinction between reality and make-believe. In her magical, room-size animations, she probes the fantastical depths of the unconscious and gives shape to the uncertainties that can haunt contemporary experience. By projecting her uncanny images onto complex architectural configurations, Tabaimo envelops viewers in her seductive installations and casts us into her outsized visualizations of one’s innermost fears and feelings. These works mirror her insight into the challenges faced by Japan’s so-called “lost” generation, caught in the struggle to negotiate its place between tradition and modernity, isolationism and globalism, the real and virtual worlds.

Tabaimo: Her Room features three video animations, two of which have never before been seen in the US, as well as eighteen scroll-like ink drawings. Tabaimo will further explore her interest in transforming space in new, site-specific wall drawings made exclusively for this exhibition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Installation
  • Asian
  • Contemporary
  • Japanese
  • Tabaimo

Exhibition Venues & Dates