SEIZAN Gallery is pleased to announce Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones, on view from September 4 through October 18, 2025. For her third and largest solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location, the Japanese artist presents more than thirty new oil paintings and papier-mâché sculptures created over the past two years.
 

“If, as Edvard Munch once wrote, the figure in his painting embodies an ‘infinite scream passing through nature,’ Tabata’s women convey its opposite—the infinite scream forever trapped within the body.” As art critic John Yau observed in Hyperallergic, Tabata’s protagonists—women, children, and spectral figures—gesture toward psychological extremes, balancing emotion with fragility and sanity with madness. Her paintings are often modest in scale, sometimes spread across multiple small canvases or enclosed in handmade wooden frames. Through charged brushwork of oil paint or the fragile surfaces of papier-mâché, Tabata merges abstraction with representational motifs in muted palettes, setting her whimsical subjects against disquieting backdrops.

Many of the new works are informed by the passing of Tabata’s mother last year, marking a period of heightened reflection on mortality and her own eventual death. A central painting, Waiting for Bones (2025), arose from her experience at the crematorium following her mother’s funeral. In Japan, family members traditionally wait for the cremation to finish and then, with chopsticks, transfer the bones of the deceased into an urn. In the painting, a spectral figure dissolves within the cremation fire on the left, while on the right, a few figures rendered in translucent brushstrokes extend their hands to receive the remains. Both figures represent the artist herself. “When I become bones, how sad it would be if no one were waiting for me. As I painted, I wondered—do the living wait for the bones, or do those who have passed on wait for us? In the end, I felt it didn’t matter. So I decided that I could wait for myself.”

Another pivotal work, Bye Bye (2024), presents a vast expanse of white punctuated by a small figure adrift on a boat, painted with delicate strokes. “I painted it shortly after my mother passed away,” Tabata recalls. “As I painted the figure on the boat, I thought, ‘it looks like my mom!’ and then I added my hand on the left, waving at her.” This image evolved into a major sculptural installation, Ascending to Heaven, composed of over 200 papier-mâché figures on a boat enclosed in a black, bell-shaped shell.

Through this new body of work, Tabata extends her allegorical approach while drawing on deeply personal experience. Her paintings and sculptures occupy a space between reality and imagination, where intimate moments intersect with universal themes. In Waiting for Bones, her expressive brushwork transforms everyday gestures into powerful emotional statements, while her careful placement of figures evokes memory, anticipation, and absence.

Asako Tabata was born in 1972 in Kanagawa, Japan. After studying painting at Tama Art University, she became a mother and homemaker while continuing to make art at home. For many years, she kept her work largely private, exhibiting only occasionally in small galleries in Tokyo. In 2022, Tabata held her first solo exhibition in the United States, Cutting A Loquat Tree, at SEIZAN Gallery New York.