Minako Tanabe: Meat, Humor, and Ambiguity

2025/06/19

After graduating from the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, I joined a department store. After working in areas such as women's clothing buying, I resigned and opened my own gallery (Tanabe Gallery). I continue to be active as an artist today.

I have loved drawing since I was a child. I started oil painting after joining the art club in junior high school, and after entering university, I continued my creative activities with the comprehensive art group Palette Club.

I often paint themes that are familiar and commonplace in daily life but evoke a sense of oddity or humor. Recently, I have been frequently painting meat with beautiful marbling being picked up with chopsticks. This was inspired by my curiosity about meat held by chopsticks, which has a commanding presence in grocery flyers. I think it's a standard advertising pose meant to present high-quality, delicious-looking meat, but I couldn't help but notice it, and it seemed irresistibly comical to me. In our daily lives, I believe there are many other things that seem too ordinary to notice at first glance, but are actually humorous or feel out of place.

As my career path suggests, I don't have a specific consistent theme or a strong message I want to convey in my creative activities. Rather than painting everything in an easy-to-understand way, I paint up to the point I want to and then leave the rest to the viewers. Because of this, conversations with people who see my meat works often extend to social issues or types of Wagyu beef, and I am happy to receive impressions and thoughts I never would have imagined. I believe that leaving some "blank space" allows for the expansion of such unknown joys, rather than deciding everything completely. I also want to value the capacity to accept humor and the ambiguity that tends to be avoided in society.

I opened the gallery this April. Through my creative activities, I came to want more people to enjoy art and expression and to lower the barrier to purchasing works. I established this space with the aim of expanding the base of the art market and creating a place for young artists to work. As both an artist and a gallerist, I want to continue creating things and places that contain humor and ambiguity.

*Affiliations, job titles, etc., are as of the time of publication.