Minako Tanabe: Meat, Humor, and Ambiguity

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 left to open 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.

In my daily life, I often paint themes that are familiar and commonplace but feel slightly off or comical. Recently, I have been painting a lot of beautifully marbled meat being picked up with chopsticks. It all started when I became intrigued by the imposing presence of meat held by chopsticks in grocery store flyers. I think it's a standard advertising pose intended to present high-end, delicious-looking meat, but I couldn't help but notice it, and it seemed irresistibly comical to me. I believe there are many other things in daily life that we overlook because they seem so normal at first glance, but are actually comical or evoke a sense of unease.

As my career suggests, I don't have a single consistent theme or a strong message I want to convey in my creative work. Rather than painting everything in an easy-to-understand way, I paint up to the point I want to paint and leave the rest to the viewer. Because of this, conversations with people who see my meat works sometimes expand 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 blank spaces, rather than deciding everything completely, allows for that kind of unknown joy to spread. I also want to value the room to accept humor and the kind of ambiguity that tends to be avoided in society.

I opened the gallery this April. As I continued my creative activities, I began to want more people to enjoy art and expression and to lower the barrier to buying works. I established the 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 and titles are as of the time of publication.