Tanikawa defines her painting as "self-portrait" by herself. The subject she draws everyday in her self-portrait is "the empty self". She says that her "self portrait" is only a tool to express her external appearance and she does not presumably provide elements to form her ego in it. By supposing that her raison d’être is uncertain, she continues to paint "self-portrait" with the purpose to embrace and blurry herself.

Growing up in her generation where it is difficult to find out one answer with enormous amount of information in the modern digitalised society, she employs the symbolic elements such as "I", "you" and "mother" as a critical filter to distinguish herself from others. However, the recognition that she is nothing more than part of the world deepens as doing so, which leads her to continue to paint her external appearance by feeling loneliness and ambiguity of personal existence. "I" in her paintings always changes and becomes far from what she used to be as time goes by, whilst it becomes existing forever. That is to say that it is represented as what can be perceived whoever.

In addition, our body and consciousness, which are given to life through a mother, is towards to the death holding the past of childhood. Holding an inner conflict between affirmation and denial in the two sides such “mother and a child” and “life and death”, Tanikawa says that painting a self portrait as “mother” is identical with the act of praying for salvation in order to embrace everything like despair and hope some day.

Through the experiences in group exhibitions and art fairs over the past two years since first her solo exhibition, new works by Tanikawa have been largely developed to the new portraits facing off against the reality of “the empty self“ from the past portraits with the motifs that are derived from her dreams and nostalgia for her hometown.