While Everyone Sleeps

Tanaka graduated from the Department of Photography at Osaka University of Arts before moving to the United States. Based in New York, she has continued to develop a practice in which she deconstructs photographic fragments, arranges them three-dimensionally, and re-photographs the resulting compositions.

This exhibition presents her most recent body of work, created in New York between 2020—during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic—and 2023. While the anxiety and fear felt at that time now belong to the past, the world around us continues to be shaped by an equally uncertain, chaotic present: one buffeted by cutting-edge technologies like AI, where fact and disinformation circulate freely on social media. In this sense, our current era feels very much of a piece with that earlier moment of uncertainty.

The works on view were created through a method of deconstructing a single photograph into fragments, arranging them alongside everyday objects in three-dimensional compositions, and then photographing the results—giving form to an inner landscape born out of a period of confinement.

In her previous solo exhibition, “Hide and Seek,” a body of work that visualized memories from her childhood, Tanaka presented her first series to give shape to the hope, fear, and anxiety that formed her as an individual—emotions that in turn spoke to the varied emotional experiences of viewers themselves. This new exhibition continues the conceptual thread from that debut series, but as an artist living in the present moment, she now incorporates the particular sense of the pandemic era into the work.

Three pieces from this series are currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and this exhibition has been timed to coincide with that presentation.

September 5 (Saturday) – October 3 (Saturday), 2026
Wednesday – Friday : 13:00 – 19:00
Saturday : 13:00 – 17:00
Tuesday : by appointment only
Closed on Sunday and Monday

Please join us.