Tabaimo is best known for her large-scale immersive video installations that feature digitally animated hand-drawn images inspired by Japanese anime, manga and ukiyo-e woodcuts. She kickstarted her career in 1999 with Japanese Kitchen, which evoked an unsettling sense of dread in prosperous Japanese society. After a run of solo shows at leading institutions such as the Fondation Cartier in Paris and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in 2011 Tabaimo represented Japan at the 54th Venice Biennale.
This year marks a turning point in the artist’s practice. With Touch on an Absence, a recent collaborative group show with three animation directors at Tokyo’s Warehouse Terrada, she reassessed her relationship with animation and installation. Moving away from the meticulously constructed narratives she has created in the past, she gravitated towards a freer, intuitive form of storytelling.
The new show will see the artist presenting several palm-sized video installations that stage serendipitous encounters between objects she has collected personally over the years, fragments from her previous animation works and newly drawn images. “This show is a new challenge to me,” Tabaimo explains. “A different exercise to the usual, like a novelist writing a short story, perhaps. What I essentially do does not change, but how I do it will feel quite different to the viewer.”
• Tabaimo: afterwards, Gallery Koyanagi, Koyanagi Bldg 9F, 1-7-5 Ginza, Chuo-ku, until 16 November