TABAIMO’s career includes performance and choreography, painting, drawing and film. She is a multi-media artist and was selected to represent Japan for the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2011, ILLUMInazioni – IILLUMInations. The amazing, immersive environmental installation teleco-soup was on view in their pavilion in the Giardini. Known for her keen sense of observation, social commentary, representation and juxtaposition from inside and outside a defined space, above and below the earth’s surface, she combines her deep knowledge of her nation’s culture, anatomy and nature and critique of our world.

Her gentle approach conceals her strong message. Despite delicate and smooth strokes, pleasing color palette in the new elements drawn and painted on hand-made Japanese paper she hints at danger and inner-most fears. Tabaimo’s traditional worlds are above and below the surface, botanical and anatomical references are intertwined. Plants start to sprout from the body parts in an organic fashion. The three works on paper from 2015, made with ink, beeswax, crayon color pencil and pencil are from the flow-wer series.

The three drawings to the show concentrate on a separate part of the body. The head or foot is combined with plants and drawn in an eerily anatomically correct fashion – as if the plant were an integral part of our body’s organs. They seem naturally bound together and surreal.

Stage work included a collaboration with Ohad Naharin of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company in 2006. In 2016, she directed the performance, “Fruits borne out of rust” which toured to four cities the United States of America in 2020. This was followed by "Tangled Drop", a collaboration with circus artist Jörg Müller that toured Japan and France in 2022.

Born in 1975, she graduated in 1999 from Kyoto University of Art and Design and started exhibiting and gaining international attention immediately thereafter, including participation in the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale as well as the 52nd and 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Solo museum exhibitions in 2003 at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo were followed by those at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, FR; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, SE; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, AU; Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, FR; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Asian Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; POLA Museum Annex, Tokyo, JP and in 2023 at Kunstforeningen Gl Strand, Copenhagen, DK. A huge installation work will be presented with three independent animation artists at TERADA Warehouse in Tokyo in July 2024.

Her works are in the following museum collections: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, FR; Museum Folkwang, Essen, DE; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, IL; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Japan Foundation, Tokyo, JP; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, JP; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Leon, SP; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, SE; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Anne Mosseri-Marlio