This Ohara Museum of Art program supports young artists by offering them the use of the studio of Torajiro Kojima, a Yōga style painter.
[7] In interviews with other various publications, she has said that her expression focuses on the dark legacy of humanity but presented through the aesthetic prism of decorative beautification.
[8] In an interview conducted upon receiving the Sakuya Konohana Award from the City of Osaka, she explains that her works spring from narratives of her own creation.
The interviewer Noriko Ishibashi connects the decorative materiality of Tanihara's works to her exposure to kimono and her interest in the Royal French and Imperial Chinese ornamentations.
[9] As a junior high school student, she moved to Hokkaido from her birthplace in Saitama due to her father's work where she was bullied and experienced a serious injury.
In an interview with the Japanese Art magazine, Bijutsu Techo, she notes that this experience created a desire in her to reveal the "darkness of human beings."
She said she prioritized "looking more than painting" as she travelled around to various places in Europe like France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and Belgium to visit museums and galleries.
In her interview with Bijutsu Techo, Tanihara notes that she was particularly interested in contrast between highly detailed figures and distorted spaces in the works of Northern Renaissance artists.
She singles out Bathesheba at her Bath by Rembrandt as making a strong impression on her as well as the works of Grünewald, Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.
She felt stylistically validated observing firsthand the violence in many of these works and gained a renewed sense of confidence in the direction of her chosen subject matter.
[8] Nakai Yasuyuki, chief curator at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, positions Tanahara as a "Modern Ukiyo-e Painter" as indicated by the title of his essay for one of Tanihara's solo shows at MEM Gallery in Tokyo.
For Nakai, Iwase Matabei is one of the formative figures in the history of Ukiyo-e paintings, arguing that from the medium's inception its subject matter has focused on the macabre as evidenced in Iwasa's magnum opus The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa, a depiction of the "masochistic act of recreating the cruel murder of his own mother."