Keiichi Tanaami

Keiichi Tanaami is an artist, illustrator, and designer known for his prominence in Japan’s Neo-Dada movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Heavily influenced by Pop art, Andy Warhol, and the psychedelia and music of the 1960s, his films, prints, paintings, and sculptures also tell a more sinister story of his experiences during the Great Tokyo Air Raid of 1945. Imagery of American bombers and searchlights appear regularly in his hallucinatory works, underscoring a deep autobiographical impetus even as his work has matured. Early in his career his colorful collages of erotica that fused Eastern spiritual symbols with the vibrant colors of the sexual revolution attracted the attention of the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane, who commissioned him for album covers in 1967. His work regularly appeared in magazines as early as 1962 and he also began assembling books of his own collages and paintings around that time. Between 1970 and 1976 Tanaami created 23 films, including both animated and experimental offerings. His emotional, surreal work is a merger of dream and reality—the layered images juxtapose monotony and extravagant beauty, cheap thrills and psychological depth, art product and functional object. His later work considers life and death, the facsimile in art, and commodification—perhaps the most transparent insight into an artist who is deemed one of the first to blend art and commerce.

Tanaami has exhibited at institutions including Kawasaki City Museum, Kanagawa, Japan, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, SculptureCenter, New York, Onomichi City Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Singapore Arts Museum, Singapore, MUDAM - Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan, High Museum, Atlanta, ICA Gallery, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. He has participated in film festivals in Tallinn, Chicago, Amsterdam, Baden, London, and Mexico City, among many others, and has actively been shown at international art fairs since 2007.