Contemporary artist Tabaimo's solo exhibition "Tabaimo: Breath Flower" will be held at Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza from February 14 to April 4.
Tabaimo won the Kirin Contemporary Award for her installation "Japanese Kitchen," presented as her graduation project at Kyoto University of Art and Design. Since then, she has exhibited her animated video works at numerous international exhibitions, winning the Goto Memorial Cultural Award for New Artists in 2002 and the Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Award Encouragement Prize in 2004. In 2011, she was selected as a representative artist for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in recent years has collaborated with concerts and traditional performing arts.
This exhibition will feature a new animated work, "Aitai Seijosei," which intertwines the story of the Bunraku masterpiece "Sonezaki Shinju" with Shuichi Yoshida's full-length novel "Akunin." Tabaimo's imagined "what if" world unfolds as she compares the romantic relationships between Ohatsu and Tokubei, and between Kaneko Miho and Shimizu Yuichi, who appear in each episode.
In creating the animation, Tabaimo chose sofas and tables as motifs. The title of the work is a hiragana version of "Relative Woman," in which "relative" refers to the relationship between a man and a woman, but also evokes the "relative death" that represented double suicides in the Edo period. The artist also layers the "sexuality" of men and women into this theme, focusing on two "women" living in a complex relationship.
In addition, seven new drawings will be shown for the first time at this solo exhibition. In her drawing series "flow-wer," the motifs of flowers and human internal organs are vividly rendered using ink and beeswax.
Regarding this exhibition, Tabaimo says, "Picking flowers and turning them into cut flowers, using organs as vessels, and depicting a part of a person's life in a novel, painting, or video all have the same image in this 'Breath Flowers' exhibition. What I present is only a snippet of that, but I create all of my works imagining that flowers have roots, that organs once had souls and were breathing, and that there is a continuation before and after the period in a person's life that I depict."
An opening reception will be held on February 14th from 6:00 pm. Tabaimo will also be in attendance.
[Event Information]
"Tabaimo: Breath Flowers"
Venue: Gallery Koyanagi
Address: Koyanagi Building, 8F, 1-7-5 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Dates: February 14th to April 4th
Hours: 11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays
