An icon of the Japanese counterculture who served as the first art director for Playboy Japan, the late Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024) was enormously influential in his homeland’s contemporary art scene. His cacophonous imagery, blending references to fine art and popular culture from Japan and abroad, imprinted on a generation of artists, including Takashi Murakami.
Shinji Nanzuka, the founder of the Pop art-focused Nanzuka Underground Gallery in Tokyo, started working with Tanaami in 2005. Back then, he says, Tanaami was considered more of a commercial artist, but for the subculture-obsessed Japanese youth who grew up on Tanaami’s work, he was canonical.
“His graphic design was very inspiring to many young generations,” Nanzuka says. “He was born in 1936—before the war, and he experienced it. His career, which started in the late 1950s, represents the conjunction between democracy and American popular culture against Japanese old traditions. And this context is important for me, as well as for my generation.”
Like many artists of his era, Tanaami was heavily influenced by American culture and artists. He emulated Andy Warhol, whom he met several times both in Japan and New York, by pivoting away from pure illustration towards techniques like collage and printing. There is also a darker strain of American influence in Tanaami’s work, stemming from his survival of the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. Many motifs in his collages allude to US militarism, from comic-book fighter planes to more subtle elements like the famous roosters of the Edo-era painter Ito Jakuchu, which he deploys to reference the chickens he heard as a child, panicking in response to air-raid sirens. Much of his work of the late 1960s responded to the continued US military presence in Japan during the Vietnam War. Nanzuka adds: “He never hid his passion to say ‘No more war’.”
Despite his influence in Japan, Tanaami remains under-appreciated in the US, and this exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami is his first solo museum exhibition in the country. It covers his entire career across the many media he worked in, from collages and erotic drawings incorporating Hollywood pin-ups and manga characters to experimental films riffing on 1960s psychedelia. Art-historical references abound, from classical Western and Japanese sources to takes on canonical Modernists, such as the Pleasure of Picasso series he made just before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We wanted to work with him to connect what was one of our initial fascinations, the film and collage, to the recent work,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the ICA Miami’s artistic director and the curator of the exhibition.
Although he did not live to see the opening of his solo debut at a US museum—Tanaami died on 9 August, the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, a poignant date for someone so deeply affected by the war—he was able to see another career milestone. His first major retrospective in Japan, at the National Art Center in Tokyo, opened just two days before his death. According to Nanzuka, the artist was in hospital when the show opened and it had been “Tanaami’s big dream for his career”, the dealer says.
- Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, until 30 March 2025
