One of Asako Tabata’s strengths is her ability to infuse her work with humor, tenderness, and wistfulness all at once. These are characteristics we do not often encounter in Euro-American paintings about the death of a loved one — a subject that inspired many works in Waiting for Bones, Tabata’s third solo exhibition at Seizan Gallery. According to the press release, her mother’s passing last year “[marked] a period of heightened reflection on mortality and her own eventual death.”The nearly 60 pieces in the exhibition range from a group of identically sized collages of people, flowers, and animals mimicking Japanese culture’s reverence for business cards (or meishi) to elegiacal oil paintings such as “Bye Bye” (2024) and “Waiting for Bones” (2025) to a free-hanging papier-mâché sculpture, “Ascending to Heaven” (2025). The latter resembles a black shell with openings that viewers can peer into to see numerous lone women standing in boats.Installation view of Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones at Seizan Gallery, New York. Center: “Ascending to Heaven” (2025)At the center of the exhibition are these last three works. Together, they can be read as a narrative sequence that turns back on itself in unexpected ways, moving episodically from dying and bidding farewell to cremation to floating up to a presumed paradise that we never see. Instead, “Ascending to Heaven” remains suspended in the air. The women who fill it resonate with the lone figure in “Bye Bye” who stands in a boat cropped by the painting’s left edge. She faces the viewer with her hand raised, bidding farewell. On the opposite side of the canvas is a larger hand extending downward, its fingers spread apart — a gesture of letting go. The resemblance of the hands is open to multiple interpretations, from the similarity of the gesture to the mother’s and daughter’s shared mortality to the act of seeing each other and themselves off. Tabata’s introspective solitude leads her to an unexpected, even surprising confrontation with mortality. When she was painting “Waiting for Bones,” she thought:When I become bones, how sad it would be if no one were waiting for me. As I painted, I wondered—do the living wait for the bones, or do those who have passed on wait for us? In the end, I felt it didn’t matter. So I decided that I could wait for myself. Asako Tabata, “Bye Bye” (2024), oil on canvasEven when she is dealing with loaded, familiar subjects, such as her mother’s death and her own mortality, Tabata never checks the expected boxes. Rather, she depicts quirky views in a direct manner that lays bare her conflicted feelings. Her outlined figure in “Bye Bye” is both particular and anonymous. The dots and line that articulate the eyes and mouth of the otherwise featureless woman convey how one’s visual memory fades. By rendering the person and hand in the same streaked gray as the background, which seems to represent the ocean, Tabata acknowledges that chaos is inescapable and a part of us. Another papier-mâché sculpture, “Hello,” portrays a gray-haired woman wearing a sack-like dress and holding a cell phone away from her ear. She is seated on a slat supported by four high, spindly legs. Every aspect of the sculpture reflects the precarity of her emotional state: the spindly legs and narrow seat, the distance of the telephone from the ear, the echoing of the dress’s vertical black and gray stripes with the seat’s thin legs — which should not be able to support her weight — and the woman’s perilously high placement.No matter the size, support, or material, including found pieces of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché, Tabata’s works seem to excavate an inchoate feeling. Nuanced and singular, each piece evokes complex interior states that refute any reductive reading. Installation view of Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones at Seizan Gallery, New YorkAsako Tabata: Waiting for Bones continues at Seizan Gallery (525 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 18. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.