The late Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024) has entered into eternity, however the afterlife is hardly new territory for him. The Japanese Pop artist usually blurred traces between this world and different realms in his colour-saturated works starting from posters to movies, sculptures to model collaborations. To Tanaami, who was a toddler throughout the firebombing of Tokyo within the Second World Struggle, dying was viscerally actual from a younger age, haunting his creativeness and fuelling his creativity.
The artist’s first large-scale retrospective opened on the Nationwide Artwork Heart, Tokyo (NACT) simply two days earlier than he died on the age of 88. He was concerned in its planning even whereas hospitalised, and his spirit is current within the present in each sense of the phrase. Practically a dozen rooms inform the complete story of his artwork by greater than 500 works, together with new and just lately rediscovered items bursting together with his phantasmagorical type.
Skilled in graphic design, Tanaami expressed curiosity in Pop artwork and serialisation early in his profession, believing that prints deserved better appreciation. The mockingly titled silkscreens of ORDER MADE!! (1965) fill a whole wall with technicolour variations of striped jackets, often incorporating photos of the bomber planes that terrorised him in childhood.
The artwork historian Hiroko Ikegami has famous the affect of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on Tanaami’s work, whereas additionally stating its affinity with contemporaries like Tiger Tateishi, Tadanori Yokoo and Ushio Shinohara, pioneers of Tokyo Pop who mixed American cultural references with symbols of Japan and artwork from the Edo interval (1603-1868). Realm of the Afterlife/ Realm of the Residing (2017) affords a summation of Tanaami’s maximalist collage aesthetic, full of favoured themes equivalent to fighter jets, skulls, sexualised female figures and animals quoted from the works of the 18th-century painter Ito Jakuchu.
The NACT retrospective is a uncommon likelihood to see a lot of Tanaami’s movies, which deliver to life the sense of movement so usually prompt in his static compositions. Tanaami belonged to a era of experimental animators working in “expanded cinema”, who used projectors in unconventional methods. His brief movies equivalent to Crayon Angel (1975) display a dreamlike, episodic high quality with uneasy undertones, just like movies by modern animators like Tabaimo, considered one of his former college students at Kyoto College of Artwork and Design.
Offered below the apt title Adventures in Reminiscence, Tanaami’s multifarious artwork displays our human impulse to unconsciously alter our recollections as we transfer by life. Photographs that first surfaced for the artist in desires, fears and fantasies are repackaged and reborn, taking up new lives of their very own.
• Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Reminiscence, The Nationwide Artwork Heart, Tokyo, 7-22-2 Roppongi, Minato-ku, till 11 November
