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Keiichi Tanaami at the ICA: A Japanese Giant Gets a Posthumous Survey

Even before his passing earlier this year, Keiichi Tanaami had a reputation in his home country of Japan as one of the essential artists of the postwar era—a weirdo who digested the fallout of World War II via an avalanche of surreal imagery. In the US, he is far less well known, though that will hopefully change after this survey, a show that is as overwhelming as it is engrossing.

Upon entry, viewers are bombarded with collage-filled walls and sound bleed from films that play simultaneously, an effect that would seem undesirable were it not for the fact that Tanaami placed a premium on extravagance. The earliest works in the show are collages from the 1960s in which the artist, who saw the Allied Forces’s air raids on Japan firsthand as a kid, voiced antiwar sentiments by way of presenting headless people in suits and big-breasted women, all in the neon colors of psychedelia. The latest works, some made just a few years prior to his passing, are paintings studded with rhinestones and old-school pin-ups clipped from magazines.

Tanaami’s animations from the ’60s, with their rapid-fire editing, are among the most over-the-top works here. They combine images of explosions with shots of chickens and, naturally, naked women, a constant in this artist’s oeuvre, which contains more than a shred of misogyny. Those animations speak well to the Japanese tendency during the postwar era to push traumas out of sight, out of mind—Tanaami’s incessant flow of pictures gives viewers little time to think much at all. It’s not surprising that these works have aged well. What’s more shocking is that his later work, which is stuffed to the gills with kitschy allusions to modernist masterpieces, looks quite nice when placed in context with the works that made him famous. The war machine never died after the ’60s, and neither did Tanaami’s creativity, which led him to accept déclassé styles as a part of his continued quest for aesthetic assault.