[2] In her Kyūshu-ha period, Tabe investigated the issues related to environmentalism and the aspects of female identity, including sexuality, procreation, and social advancement.
[10] Tabe drew the streets of downtown Fukuoka, where Iwataya was located, and worked on many paintings of landscape and daily objects.
[6] In the building of Iwataya, there was a small gallery where Tabe first encountered future Kyūshū-ha members including Sakurai Takami, Ishibashi Yasuyuki, Ochi Osamu, and others.
During that period, Tabe often visited the studio of Terada Ken’ichirō, an artist then associated with the Nika (Second Section Society) and later joined Kyūshū-ha.
Employing asphalt and oil paint to create thick texture — a signature style of Kyūshū-ha members’ work — Tabe staged an energized blast of abstracted shapes and colors to represent the presumed emotion of the fish.
Clumps of hexagonal grid lines explode from the center resemble schools of angered, recalcitrant fish, seemingly crushed by a great force from above.
[10] The use of both industrial and organic materials reflects Tabe's environmentalist concern, making the painting an early example of the artist’s social consciousness.
[6][7] The theme of procreation and swarm was carried over to the Propagating (Hanshoku suru, 1958/1988), series that reportedly consists of four paintings, all created in 1958.
While having not been explicitly stated, the Propagating series can also be read in the framework of the female, mirroring Tabe’s later investigation of women as child-bearers.
Three of the five Placards feature a representation of the African continents, and two of them also had strands of reddish hemp palm fiber pasted onto the collages, pointing at the blood shed in acquiring freedom.
[15] The other two of the series placed the American flag, torn and reshaped, as the central element, and one of the two shows barbed wire and enlarged, drawn by the artist, which possibly references the Vietnam War.
[7] Culling visual materials from news and popular culture, Tabe sought to create placards that are more powerful than the ones with only texts.
[16][17] The original work has not been extant and the artist recreated a version, one without the child mannequins, for an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto in 2004.
Moreover, she also exhibited a work that showed a gourd with a rubber navel, resembling “unborn feces,” and the object was put in a rainbow-colored washing machine and stirred around.
The expression of a radical awareness of the problems of sex from the women’s side served as the fundamental characteristic of Tabe's artistic concerns.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she taught painting classes at home while raising her children, and participated in the annual Trends in Contemporary Art in Kyushu (九州・現代美術の動向) exhibition since 1967.
[22] In the 1969 exhibition, she participated in a parade, carrying a doll on her back as she walked through the city, trying to demonstrate the hardships housewives faced in raising their children.
[15] In the 1990s, Tabe further expanded her diverse body of work to include a series of collages focusing on apples, which became her main motif for many years.