Artforum

Leading Japanese Pop artist Keiichi Tanaami, whose lively paintings, sculptures, and animated films explored the trauma of war and the hybridization of culture, died August 9 at the age of eighty-eight after suffering a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer known as myelodysplastic syndrome two months prior. Known for his bright, graphic, manga-esque style that presaged the Superflat movement, Tanaami gained renown in the 1960s for Neo-Dada-inflected works that incorporated American pop and counterculture as well as the violence of World War II, which he experienced firsthand as a child. Featuring subjects ranging from anthropomorphic goldfish to Hollywood actresses, spiky, branching pine trees to complex and fanciful architecture, his oeuvre was psychedelic in both appearance and approach. “A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person,” he said. “My life is not a straight shot, with one central theme running through it like a book. It would be more properly called a ‘magazine editor’s life,’ spent looking about at my surroundings constantly, wandering from place to place, engaging in a wide variety of work along the way.”

Keiichi Tanaami was born in Tokyo on July 21, 1936; his father was a textile wholesaler. At the age of six, he was forced to shelter alongside his family at his grandfather’s house as US forces firebombed the city; in 1945, he witnessed the US B-29 bombing of Tokyo that killed roughly 100,000 civilians and left more than one million homeless. His youthful experiences of war shaped the artist’s life and practice, his works frequently featuring planes, flames, searchlights, and fleeing crowds. “I was rushed away from my childhood, a time that should be filled with eating and playing, by the enigmatic monstrosity of war; my dreams were a vortex of fear and anxiety, anger and resignation,” he remembered. “On the night of the air raid, I remember watching swarms of people flee from bald mountaintops. But then something occurs to me: was that moment real? Dream and reality are all mixed up in my memories, recorded permanently in this ambiguous way.”

Having become interested in art as a young boy, Tanaami originally planned to become a cartoonist, studying under noted postwar cartoonist Kazushi Hara while still in junior high. Following Hara’s sudden death, he set his sights on manga, studying design at Tokyo’s Musashino Art University. After graduating, he took a job at an ad agency but quickly relinquished it as his reputation grew and private commissions piled up. He spent the 1960s working as an independent graphic designer and illustrator while participating in the Neo-Dada movement that had sprung up in Japan in reaction to Abstract Expressionism. In the late 1960s he began experimenting with the then-new medium of video. His first hand-drawn animated work, Marionettes in Masks, 1965, was included in the inaugural Sogetsu Animation Festival, held that same year.

In 1967, Tanaami visited New York for the first time, stopping in at Andy Warhol’s Factory. That visit, too, would have an outsize impact on his career, in terms of both his incorporation of American advertising into his work, and his outlook. “Like Warhol, I decided not to limit myself to one medium, to fine art or design only,” he said, “but instead to explore many different methods.” His work of the late 1960s and the 1970s, during which time he traveled frequently between the US and Japan, buzzed with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and anti-war messages. In these years, he was commissioned to create album covers for the Japanese releases of American bands including the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane and became the first art director of Japanese Playboy.