The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presents “Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage,” the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition. Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024, Tokyo) has been a pioneering figure in Japanese and global Pop art for seven decades, creating magnificently immersive works across media in order to consider American and Japanese culture in the post-war period. Tanaami anticipated the crossover of popular culture and fine art, and through his connections to design has taken a radical and critical approach to how images of desire and violence transform society. Works included in this exhibition, produced between 1965 and 2024, track the artist’s use of collage to express the complex media landscape of our time.
Tanaami’s life and work are deeply informed by his upbringing in Japan, the trauma of the Second World War, and the country’s postwar reconstitution. Although the war had forced Tanaami and his mother to flee to the countryside in 1943, the massive United States air raids on Tokyo at the end of the conflict, as well as his experience in air raid shelters, had immense impact on the then-nine-year-old boy and continue to haunt his imagination. Tanaami’s hallucinatory works brim with American airplanes, search lights, monsters real and imagined, and fleeing masses. Sexual images permeate his works across decades, as do synthetic colors; Tanaami records popular culture commercializing desire in order to suppress the devastation of war. Tanaami graduated from the Musashino Art University, Kodaira, Japan, with a degree in graphic design in 1960. He forged a successful career in design and advertising, working as the first art director of Japanese Playboy and creating record covers for Jefferson Airplane and the Monkees, which contributed to the introduction of psychedelic culture in Japan. Go to Website
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