In an appealing New York solo debut, the young Tokyo-based artist Tabaimo (Ayako Tabata) turned James Cohan's main space into a virtual bathhouse. Japanese Bathhouse--Gents (2000) was the featured video installation, shown on three walls that took up much of the gallery, creating a stage set you couldn't enter, with a dark wood floor that sloped gently downward toward you, supporting real yellow plastic wash basins. On either side of this set were two glossy pyramidal stacks of more basins, while the sound component consisted of classic Japanese music.

Tabaimo draws by hand hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pictures, then scans them into a computer to make her animated videos. In style, color scheme and shifting points of view, they recall traditional Japanese woodcuts like those of Hokusai, whom the artist particularly favors. They have also been updated by the pervasive spirit of manga and anime, an influence that has stamped itself on at least two generations of artists in Japan and their counterparts elsewhere.

Tabaimo's bathhouse was beguiling, like a charming, large-scale scroll or screen painting with many pictorial flourishes, such as moving images against still backgrounds, or real objects among illusionistic ones. The content of the piece, however, was polemical, as she uses increasingly obsolete traditional institutions to query changing social and economic conditions, comparing the lives of women and men in today's Japan via a series of short vignettes. For instance, once absolutely segregated by sex, the bathhouse in Japan can now be communal. In one droll sequence, men in business suits are soaking incongruously and uncomfortably in their bath as naked women jump in beside them, eventually displacing them. One of the artist's recurrent theses, sympathetic to the current plight of Japanese men, is that they are under extreme, unrelenting pressure--which may be true--and that it is women in Japan who are now privileged--which may not be.

Also included in the show was a more succinct animated video, Hanabi-ra (Flower Petal), 2002, an enchanting visual poem on the cycles of life, told symbolically. The image is a drawing of an undressed man seen from the back, his pale yellow skin acting as the ground, exquisitely "tattooed" with cascades of tinted flowers that resemble those found in Japanese paintings and textiles. A butterfly flutters by to alight on a peonylike bloom, an insect buzzes, and a carp glides through the body, coming in and out of view. In the meantime, petals are falling from the tattoos, first one at a time and slowly, then faster and faster until only bare branches remain. The figure also disintegrates, falling to the ground in several pieces that resemble curled paper. Life is fleeting, Hanabi-ra seems to say, and art is an illusion--but don't despair, the cycle will begin again.

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