Tanaka Raou: "Hibana"
Raou Tanaka — Artist page
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Tanaka Raou, Hibana — The Tiger Lineage, a Single Work in the Fifth Year
Tanaka Raou’s new work Hibana (acrylic on panel, F15 / 652 × 530 mm) takes the tiger as its subject — a motif that has served as both the origin and the core of this painter’s practice.
In 2020, at his debut solo exhibition Tora wa Kaze ni Shitagau (The Tiger Follows the Wind) at Sendai Mitsukoshi, Tanaka introduced his first tiger as an animal painter. In March 2025, his solo exhibition Nijimiゆku Seimei (Life Dissolving) at Gallery Seek (Caretta Shiodome) arrived at a mode of expression in which the black of ink and the gold of acrylic contend and bleed into one another on the picture surface. Hibana occupies the most recent node in this lineage — an ongoing practice of renewing one’s own expression through the repeated depiction of the tiger.
The rigid support of the panel receives the material behavior of acrylic pigment differently from canvas. Rather than being absorbed into fibers, the paint bursts, collides, and congeals at the surface. That blunt, physical directness aligns with the energy compressed into the tiger’s limbs — an explosion held at the instant before release.
Tanaka Raou holds the distinction of having won the overall championship and been inducted into the Hall of Fame at the ISCA World Caricature Championship, held in Nevada, USA, in 2014. The rigorously trained eye capable of seizing the essence of a subject in an instant continues to underpin his canvases after his transition to painting. At the same time, his approach to making work is marked by a persistent drive toward the removal of armor — a refusal to settle into accumulated technique, an exposure of the self anew with each act of painting. As a result, the image of the tiger grows sharper with each iteration, and the presence of life seeps into the very margins of the picture plane.
The heat contained within Hibana does not resolve itself inside the picture. Beyond the tiger’s gaze, in the space the body is about to occupy in the next instant — within that absence, a single flash of sparks struck by claw against claw scatters inside the viewer as well.
The work is also available to view as a video.
For inquiries, please contact Gallery Seek.
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