Tabaimo michael

Tabaimo at the National Gallery of Art 'Of tortoises and haunted mirrors: Tabaimo at SAAM,” by Michael Upchurch.
Tabaimo is a contemporary Japanese artist.
A walkthrough on September 15 2011 with artist Tabaimo and Chair of Asia Art Archive Jane DeBevoise on the occasion of Tabaimo's exhibition 'DanDAN' at James.

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Tabaimo: Blow

Fusing traditional Japanese art forms with contemporary digital animation, the Japanese artist Tabaimo’s 2009 artwork Blow is on view at Transformer Station for the first time since its 2012 acquisition by the Cleveland Museum of Art. A pioneering video artist, she created Blow as a four-channel, immersive video installation that blurs lines between fantasy and reality.

Upon entering the immersive exhibition, visitors are transported to a constructed world of the artist’s creation. Animated bubbles, fragmented body parts, and various plants float through space in a five-minute looped video. Using a kind of printmaking technique that recalls the artist’s inspiration from Japanese woodcut prints, she often layers different drawings to create her digital videos. For the human body parts seen throughout Blow, she drew the musculature, skeleton, veins, and skin separately, then scanned and combined them for a result that is realistic yet imperfect. The accompanying audio, which mimics the dripping and rushing of water, is an acoustic collage of digitally invented

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Of tortoises and haunted mirrors: Tabaimo at SAAM

Something old meets something new in the video installations of contemporary Japanese artist Tabaimo. Her playful deconstructions of spatial sense and image-continuity in “Tabaimo: Utsutsushi Utsushi” may strike you as surreal or even freakish. But they’re rooted in centuries-old traditions.

So what is “Utsutsushi Utsushi”?

In her artist’s statement, Tabaimo (who, like Madonna, goes by one name) says it’s a term used in Japanese ceramics, meaning “to copy.”

EXHIBITION REVIEW

‘Tabaimo: Utsutsushi Utsushi’

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, through Feb. 26. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St., Seattle; $5-$9 (206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org).

“However, for something to be an utsushi,” she adds, “it has to extend beyond being a mere reproduction [and] offer up new ideas, display the creator’s individuality.” (“Utsutsushi” is a word Tabaimo coined herself. Her definition of it: “To make an utsushi. The state of having been utsushi’d.”)

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Tabaimo’

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Asia Art Archive
in America

Jane DeBevoise (JD): Tabaimo, it is a pleasure for us to have the opportunity to walk through your exhibition with you.

Tabaimo (T): Thank you. I think I would like to start here, with guignorama. I have episodes of eczema and this work takes this condition as a point of departure. It is more abstract than works I have made in the past. There is no narrative, but it details the fears, emotions, and feelings I have under my skin, both literally and figuratively. These may be issues that we all bear – issues to which we can all relate. The palette for this work is also quite different from the other works, as you will see when we walk through the exhibition. In this show, each of the works uses a different method for coloring.

JD: This looks like a watercolor.

T: Yes. I have also used Japanese calligraphy to help make the work more textural.

JD: It is interesting the way in which the fingers penetrate the surface, and then disappear under the skin, as if you have been inhabited.

T: That represents the transformative