Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1932. Around 1953, on the advice of Akira Kanayama, a fellow student at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art’s Art Research Institute, she created the collage work Calendar, which was a turning point in her interest in abstract art.

She then joined the Zero-kai (Zero Society), which was formed by Akira Kanayama, Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, and others with the aim of creating cutting-edge art, before joining the Gutai Art Association in 1955. Tanaka’s experimental and innovative works, which incorporate combinations of materials that cannot be grasped by sight alone, such as sound, electricity, space, and time, have attracted much attention, particularly among the works of the Gutai Art Association, such as Work (Bell), in which 20 bells installed on the floor of the venue ring in sequence when the audience presses a switch, and Denkifuku (Electric Dress), in which approximately 200 light bulbs and tubes painted in nine different colors of synthetic resin enamel are made into a garment of light that blinks irregularly, which the artist herself wore in the exhibition.

She then shifted her creative focus to two-dimensional works, and throughout her life continued to paint a series of paintings consisting of circles and lines corresponding to the light bulbs and wires of an electric suit. ’86 G is one of these works. The circles and lines that Tanaka draws with enamel paints are intertwined, emphasizing their glossy surface, revealing a superficial expanse that seems to cling to the skin, appealing to the viewer’s cutaneous senses. This orientation toward singular superficiality is an extension of Tanaka’s interest in the visible surface of the body as seen in Denkifuku (Electric Dress).