A visit to "Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Memory" will instantly assure you that Tanaami was one of Japan's greatest artists, but his reputation has only just been secured by this major retrospective of his work, an exhibition that he just managed to live to see, dying the day after it opened in August. November 24th sees the opening of his first US solo museum exhibition “Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage” at ICA Miami.
Tanaami's climb to "serious art respectability" was a long one, starting out in graphic design and trashy advertising, before becoming the art director of the Japanese version of "Playboy," essentially a porn mag, despite occasional pseudo-intellectual posturing.
Despite being based in relatively "drug free" Tokyo, he successfully imbibed that whole psychedelic "Andy Warhol/ Roy Lichtenstein/ Yellow Submarine / Monty Python" 1960s aesthetic, giving it a distinctly Japanese spin.
Despite being based in relatively "drug free" Tokyo, he successfully imbibed that whole psychedelic "Andy Warhol/ Roy Lichtenstein/ Yellow Submarine / Monty Python" 1960s aesthetic, giving it a distinctly Japanese spin.
The show at the equally surreal Kisho-Kurokawa-designed National Art Centre Tokyo (NACT) is a visual triumph, with the white "3D canvas" of the museum's voluminous spaces amply filled by the vivid colours and chaotic juxtapositions of Tannami's work.
This includes collages, graphic art, fine art, pop art sculptures, and animation. One area is also entirely dedicated to Tanaami's takes on Picasso works, so you can add "tributes" and "forgeries" to the list as well.
This includes collages, graphic art, fine art, pop art sculptures, and animation. One area is also entirely dedicated to Tanaami's takes on Picasso works, so you can add "tributes" and "forgeries" to the list as well.
But what the exhibition achieves in spades is pure sensory overload, something that is not easy to do in a city where the "background noise" of sensory overload is already a steady state.
Particularly impressive are some large Japanese folding screens, showing a visual smorgasbord of pop art imagery intermingled with various Japanese motifs, bits of porn and Western comics, and other consumeristic cliches.
Then there are his early collages, composed from images apparently cut from books, magazines, and posters. Normally this is a form of art that becomes quickly dated, but these still feel fresh and new.
The curators understandably attempt to tie together all the "visual shards" from this psychedelic explosion with the concept of "memory," relating it to all that Tanaami saw in his long life (1936-2024). This also maps perfectly onto the roller-coaster ride that Japan went through in the same period. For instance, we are told that the frequent "goldfish" motifs stem from one kept by his father that the young Tanaami remembers swimming in its tank as flashes from falling WWII bombs illuminated the water.
The curators understandably attempt to tie together all the "visual shards" from this psychedelic explosion with the concept of "memory," relating it to all that Tanaami saw in his long life (1936-2024). This also maps perfectly onto the roller-coaster ride that Japan went through in the same period. For instance, we are told that the frequent "goldfish" motifs stem from one kept by his father that the young Tanaami remembers swimming in its tank as flashes from falling WWII bombs illuminated the water.
But what really ties the surreal chaos together for me is the constant undertow of humour that seems to sweep all the fragments of visual and cultural detritus from several decades into odd, interesting, ironic, and hilarious conjunctions.
If you rush, you can still see it. The show closes on the 11th of November. People in Florida can see the show at ICA Miami.
Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024)
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