Kouichi Tabata was born in 1979 in the Tochigi prefecture. He received a B.A in Intermedia Art from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2004, where he also received an M.A. in Oil Painting in 2006. He currently lives and works in Berlin, having completed a residency with the Grant for Overseas Research supported by the Pola Art Foundation in 2011.
Tabata produces paintings that incorporate kinetic elements, and video works which have been composed under painterly constraints. Notable works include “bee” (2006), a video work created from countless images of bees that the artist had drawn until the ink of his pen ran out, and the “one way or another” series comprised of drawings and oil paintings where a single motif is depicted across two separate support mediums and then “shifted” to meet their completion. Through such “shifts” between media and the very support medium, Tabata enable the various imagery contained within the subject before ones eyes to carefully emerge. Instead of converging a single thing and its surrounding traces into one, he presents a perspective that connect to their different means of presence and movement in the context of a time and space that could have simultaneously lapsed.
Tabata’s recent exhibitions include, “scenery with milk”, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2020); “marmelo and the two sides,” Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2018); “one way or another,” Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo (2016), “Scape,” Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London (2015); and “trace of images,” Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo (2016).
He has participated in group exhibitions such as, “Chants d’oiseaux” Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2024); Kouichi Tabata + Hirofumi Isoya, “To design the misalignment”, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2024); “Glass Tableware in Still Life - Yoko Andersson Yamano and 18 Painters”
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (travel to Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery ) (2023); “sky”, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2023); “Recent Discovery” CADAN × ISETAN ART GALLERY”, Isetan Shinjuku art gallery, Tokyo (2023); “Yamino Iki”, MtK Contemporaly Art, Kyoto (2022); and “hueLe Museum art Labo supported by Yutaka Kikutake Gallery” GINZA SIX 4FhueLe Museum art Labo, Tokyo (2022). Tabata’s works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo), Toyota Art Collection (Aichi), and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo).