Inner Side—Outer Side

The series Inner Side—Outer Side is conceived to recall both sides of a bowl or pot as well as the organic form of a cave or a womb. This particular version is built of nine layers of hemp cloth and coated with two black layers, one to two red layers, and another three black layers. Only on the backside of the sculpture did Tanaka grind the surface to reveal the underlying red layers. Prior to making this work, he had reconfigured the U form to resemble the wavy line of an S only in small models, or maquettes, but up to then had not executed the design in such a large size.