The operative word is: dark. The venue itself, the museum's cavernous Grand Gallery, is dimly lit and too large, despite the artist's effective use of the huge walls to screen her video images. Even the room exhibiting Tabaimo's non-video work -- color illustrations and drawings -- is dark. Perhaps the gloomy ambience is meant to accentuate Tabaimo's vision, which is indeed a dark one, as exemplified by these five animation-video installations about lives lived in cramped housing-complex apartments. The waving tresses of hair in her work Yudangami are shiveringly eerie.

ROMANTICA presented this solo performance directed by Makiko Hayashi and performed by Keiko Yokomachi, with offstage voice by Tomoro Taguchi and music by Naruyoshi Kikuchi. Hayashi's dance and theater pieces seem to focus on beauty itself incarnated in speech and movement, and have a toxically addictive flavor not found in most artistic stage work. Here a woman who was run over by a man in a car suddenly materializes in the car and proceeds to make the man her slave. The work hints at possibilities for a new kind of performance format.