Tara Tamaribuchi investigates human experience in organic, unfolding art from a Buddhist diasporic perspective. She is interested in impermanence, connecting the past and present to new futures. Working across mediums, from spatial installations and public art to painting and social practice, she builds layered structures of visual material from ancestral forms and everyday phenomena. Recent projects delve into parenting; link WWII Japanese American incarceration and immigrant detention to the US today; memorialize the Gen X rave and club scene; and interrogate colonialist collections of material culture.
Recent exhibitions include the Camouflage Net Project at Galpão, São Paulo, Brazil; Awakening the Buddha, teaching artist/museum intervention at Seattle Asian Art Museum; and Groove Bardos at Mass MoCA. She is leading an effort to save over 100 Seattle art studios from redevelopment at the Inscape Arts Building, the former INS immigration and detention center in the Chinatown-International District. As an artist, she has been building support from civic leaders and working on creative placemaking with the community at the intersection of art, immigration history, and the C-ID neighborhood. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Lesley Art+Design, a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BA in Journalism from George Washington University.

“In the Camouflage Net Project, the viewer’s experience intersects with specific facts that need to be brought to light. It is an artwork layered with meaning: rereading camp labor with kimono materiality to send pride of heritage back in time; the idea of camouflage blending people, objects, and their surroundings so that we see the true nature of people as interconnected with each other and the world. Because the project is about Japanese American incarceration and its connection to immigrant families today, the viewer is of great importance. I have a responsibility to present these issues with care because it is about my community’s trauma. It is an opportunity to share our history, which is not commonly known.”

“I have a potential comic book origin story for how Asian ancestral forms came into my work. Flashback to the 1990s in journalism school: I was taking East Asian Art History and on a field trip to an Asian art museum. The docent brought out two large 3,000-year-old Shang Dynasty bronzes. “Try holding one!” she said, placing it in my hands. At that moment, I felt a marvelous zing across time and place, like shaking hands with my ancestors. Whatever happened that day solved my sense of dislocation as a Chinese and Japanese American. It was like I had grown roots on this earth, knowing where I came from. Fast-forward ten years: I was learning to paint in art school in a Western tradition. Something felt weird. Why was I painting in this way? I remembered that whole other art history and that day in the museum. I was so used to having to paint from live observation in class, that I asked my professor, Arvie Smith, if it would be okay to appropriate Japanese patterns. “You own these images! When you were born, you inherited them! They belong to you!” I suddenly felt empowered to own a thing — imagery, no less. Since then, I have applied these forms, but the underlying motive has been to root across time and bring them into the future. Western painting is still very much in my brain. I apply that way of thinking with ancestral forms to create work that expresses a hybrid identity, something that is American.”

“My various projects relate to arcs in human history, so even though it is art, it is about lived experience. I always base my work on specific meanings, but I am also concerned with the viewer's sense and the dialog they bring. My goal is to structure my work so that the viewer can enter it in their mind, and I want their experience with the work to unfold. My work is never fully realized until the audience engages with it.
Some of my work is a social practice that relies on viewer interaction to create the work. In Awakening the Buddha, museum visitors made paper flowers and learned to offer them to a standing marble Buddha in the Seattle Asian Art Museum. I intended to de-aestheticize the Buddhas in the museum, but the personal experience of doing so belongs to the participant. I didn’t tell them they had to offer their flowers, only that they could. They all surprised me by making the offering and showing gratitude to the Buddha, and so they did this work to reinvigorate true meaning to these forms.”

Tara Tamaribuchi

Jasmine Fetterman

Alan Lau