Tabaimo: DANMEN exhibition turns personal

Ten years have passed since artist Tabaimo made her triumphant debut, nabbing the Kirin Contemporary Award in 1999 with her graduation project "Japanese Kitchen" at the tender age of 23. Today the Kansai-born creator continues to make thoughtful, animated video installations that pick apart the deceptively mundane components of everyday life in contemporary Japan.

Her latest show "Tabaimo: DANMEN" at the Yokohama Art Museum is her first large scale solo exhibition at a public Japanese museum. With the word "danmen" (literally "cross-section"), the artist provides a clever moniker for her generation that is in fact a play on the phrase "dankai no sedai" (literally, "solidarity generation") given to Japanese baby-boomers. The idea of "cross-section" is key to the artistic work at hand.

"In this current time of change, I think Tabaimo’s work, which depicts a fluctuating sense of values, offers a great deal of meaning," says curator Eriko Kimura.

The exhibition, which was three years in the making, includes a series of somewhat surreal illustrations and larger than life video installations that draw attention to what the artist perceives as the fragmented, self-referential worldview of her generation -- namely those born in the 1970s.

The works are notably inward looking -- both figuratively (dreamscapes) and literally (raw tendons and the like) -- marking a thematic shift for the artist towards the personal. Kimura sees an increasing tendency in a number of 30-something artists to view society "as an extension of the self," many of whom participated along with Tabaimo in the museum's 2007 group show "Goth: Reality of the Departed World."

Yet of all Tabaimo's recent works, it is the eerily depressing "danDAN" that is perhaps the most evocative and accessible. Here the artist offers a cross-section of a housing complex with each successive room marked by the exact same layout. The rooms, however, also bear evidence of the owner's attempt to impose his or her personality on the space. It is up to the viewer, and all of us that live here, to decide whether this assertion appears futile or not.

"Tabaimo : DANMEN" runs until March 3, 2010 at the Yokohama Museum of Art. Just in case you're still wondering about the artist's name, she was born Ayako Tabata but has held onto her childhood nickname Tabaimo -- a contraction of her last name and the Japanese word for little sister "imouto."

Yokohama Museum of Art: Minato Mirai 3-4-1, Nishi-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken, tel. 045 221 0300, www.yaf.or.jp/yma