Anger of Fishes (Gyozoku no Ikari, 魚族の怒り) (1957)

Beginning in 1957, Tabe created multiple marine-themed paintings, including Fish 1 & 2 (Gyozoku 1 & 2, 1957), Conversation by the Sea 1 & 2 (Umi de no hanashi 1 & 2, 1957), and the best known one, Anger of Fishes (Gyozoku no Ikari, 1957).^[6][7][9] Detailing her interest in this subject matter, Tabe puts,

“I’ve made fish a theme of mine. It’s something that started when I began to feel a fascination with a biology, an ecology, other than the human one. The forms of fish and shells, when you really concentrate on them, don’t make any single stable form. In their wet sliminess we can receive and feel them in any way we choose. They’re also full of irony and humor. My aim is to capture what is so hard to capture, swimming around freely.”^[9][13]

In making these paintings, Tabe sought to explore the fecundity of nonhuman ecology and attempted to visualize the motion and even unpredictability of marine lives. Employing asphalt and oil paint to create thick texture — a signature style of Kyūshū-ha members’ work — Tabe staged an energized blast of abstracted shapes and colors to represent the presumed emotion of the fish. Clumps of hexagonal grid lines explode from the center resemble schools of angered, recalcitrant fish, seemingly crushed by a great force from above. With the rusting red, the rough surface exhibit sandstone-like quality. Tabe also used cross-sections of a bamboo broom handle to make rings and stuck them to the canvas with tar.^[9] The use of both industrial and organic materials reflects Tabe's environmentalist concern, making the painting an early example of the artist’s social consciousness.^[14] Anger of Fishes won the Asahi Silver Prize at the 3rd Western Women's Art Exhibition (1959) and the Gold Prize at the 3rd Western Japan Western-style Painting Newcomer's Excellence Exhibition (1960), and was exhibited in the 2nd Kyushu Independent Exhibition organized by the Nishinippon Shimbun.^[5][6]

Propagating (Hanshoku suru, 繁殖する, 1958/1988)^[6]

The theme of procreation and swarm was carried over to the Propagating (Hanshoku suru, 1958/1988), series that reportedly consists of four paintings, all created in 1958.^[9] The tar-coated bamboo rings have taken much stronger presence now as to form the central figures. The groupings of the rings characterize various formations of lives, human or nonhuman. Other artists in Kyūshū-ha, such as Taniguchi Toshio and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, also explored the subject of propagation. While having not been explicitly stated, the Propagating series can also be read in the framework of the female, mirroring Tabe’s later investigation of women as child-bearers.^[14]

In September 1961, two of Mitsuko Tabe’s works, the Placards (1961) and Artificial Placenta (1961), were exhibited at the 3rd Kyūshū-ha Exhibition at Ginza Gallery, Tokyo.^[6][15]

Placards series (Purakādo, プラカード, 1961)^[6][7]

Tabe sourced magazine cutouts and kiss-shaped stamps and used resin to produce these collages. The magazine cutouts contain images of American popular culture, especially those of African American jazz musicians and soldiers at war. Three of the five Placards feature a representation of the African continents, and two of them also had strands of reddish hemp palm fiber pasted onto the collages, pointing at the blood shed in acquiring freedom. The images and the map loosely point to the civil rights movement in the United States and perhaps the independences of African nations.^[14] The other two of the series placed the American flag, torn and reshaped, as the central element, and one of the two shows barbed wire and enlarged, drawn by the artist, which possibly references the Vietnam War.^[6] Culling visual materials from news and popular culture, Tabe sought to create placards that are more powerful than the ones with only texts.^[14]

Artificial Placenta (Jinkō taipan, 人工胎盤, 1961)^[6][7]

Created while Tabe was pregnant with her first son, Artificial Placenta was a mixed-media installation based on the notion that “the true liberation of women is only possible if they are liberated from pregnancy.”^[15][16] The installation consists of the hip portion of three mannequins and the torso portions of two child mannequins. The hip sections, covered by cotton, cloth, and scattered nails, were placed upside down on pedestals against a wall. With an opening in the center that resembles the exposure of the uterus, each hip section had a vacuum tube inserted into the reproductive organ. The artist also used ping-pong balls to outline the opening. Above the hip sections, the child torso sections were hung horizontally on the same wall.^[6][14] The installation exposed the pain of the female body during childbearing in an aggressive manner,^[15] resonating with the notion that considers women as childbearing machines.^[14] The exhibition was attended by many members of the Neo Dada artists and art critics. The predominant male audiences predictably overlooked Tabe's ideological message in this installation.^[9] It was also scandalously featured in the October 20th issue of the popular weekly magazine "Doyo Manga” (土曜漫画) under the headline "Artists Who Dwell on Female Genitalia.”^[17][18] Meanwhile, Artificial Placenta did not resonate with the female audience at the time of its release. Tabe said, “[Ideas of] women’s revolution, feminism, and gender did not yet enter Japan, so there was no response from women even though I was making an important statement.^[15][16]

The original work has not been extant and the artist recreated a version, one without the child mannequins, for an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto in 2004.^[6][14] The recent exhibition of the work had prompted viewers to recognize Tabe as an early feminist.^[14]

Great Meeting of Heroes (Eiyū-tachi no dai shūkai, 英雄たちの大集会, 1962)

At the "Great Meeting of Heroes" event held at Fukuoka's Momochi Beach in November 1962, Tabe attempted to hammer nails into the lower half of a mannequin, but it took more force than expected, so she had a male artist hammer them in for her. As with “Artificial Placenta,” this is also considered to be an act of rejecting the female gender.^[19] She also created a space lined with the legs of mannequins wearing stockings, which was described by critic Yoshida Yoshie as “a cathedral of nymphomaniac rituals unique to the Kyūshū-ha’s women's group.”^[15][20]

Sex Museum (Sekkusu Hakubutsukan, セックス博物館, 1968)^[7]

Sex Museum was a project Tabe contributed to in May 1968, and it was exhibited at “The Possibility of Art through Group Union” exhibition at Fukuoka Prefectural Cultural Hall, often regarded as the last group exhibition of Kyūshū-ha. The idea of the work was proposed by Obata Hideshi.^[15] Tabe exhibited a pair of works as part of the Sex Museum. One depicted a kokeshi doll in the shape of a man's genitalia and the other one was made of a large mirror, where the lower half of a naked man and woman embracing each other as well as a woman milking with a huge bottle of milk. Moreover, she also exhibited a work that showed a gourd with a rubber navel, resembling “unborn feces,” and the object was put in a rainbow-colored washing machine and stirred around. There was also a performance component, when Tabe continuously sewed a long string that resembled male genitalia.^[15][4] Albeit titled Sex Museum, Tabe’s contributions focused on reproduction and less so on the sexual intercourse itself. In other words, she presents not the pleasurable aspect of sex, but the consequent aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, which are owed only to women. By stepping on a sewing machine, she refers to women's economic power, and by the gourd in the washing machine, she refers to lives aborted for economic reasons. The expression of a radical awareness of the problems of sex from the women’s side served as the fundamental characteristic of Tabe's artistic concerns.^[15]