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Installation view of KEIICHI TANAAMI’s (left to right) Mirror Surface, 2015, pigmented ink, acrylic silkscreen medium, crashed glass, glitter acrylic paint, acrylic paint on canvas, 200 × 172 cm (diptych), Body Decoration, 2014, FRP, iron, acrylic and urethane paint, gold plating, 246 × 150 × 90 cm, and Untitled, 2017, pigmented ink, acrylic silkscreen medium, crushed glass, glitter acrylic paint, acrylic paint on canvas, 200 × 164 cm (diptych), at chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, 2018. All works courtesy the artist and Nanzuka, Tokyo.
Keiichi Tanaami has been making art for over five decades, and is considered the father of Japanese Pop art. At the age of 81, he still spends hours in his studio each day, splicing together imagery taken from eclectic sources for new artworks. Tanaami is not only a prolific artist, he was also the first art director of Playboy’s monthly Japanese edition, produced experimental films, and educated clusters of younger artists at Kyoto University of Art and Design. He has explored a range of mediums that have been adopted into his own practice.
Drawing from Tanaami’s illustrious career that has left an enduring imprint on Japanese visual culture, K11 Guangzhou organized an exhibition that charted the artist’s procession through the years. The organization included over 40 artworks—paintings, prints, sculpture, and even furniture—for a show at Guangzhou chi K11 art space.
Several screen prints were among the oldest works on show, with a trio that testify to one of the artist’s lifelong beliefs. No More War_1, 2 and 3 (all 1967) literally carry that message in their psychedelic designs, with the works’ shared title emblazoned on each. These prints drip with acid-bright colors, and are the early results of the artist’s experimentation with LSD, built on the frightful childhood experience of surviving American air raids on Tokyo during World War II. Across the three images, we see a rainbow hugging planet Earth (though the continental coastlines have shifted), faces melted into waves of flower-power colors, heads exploding into thought bubbles, and—to leave no room for doubt—an oversized acid tab planted on a pink tongue.
Impossible perspectives and mishmashes of archetypal motifs appear in most of Tanaami’s creations. Another set of three silkscreen prints, Gikei-Zukan (B), (D) and (G) (all 1980) toy with the interconnectivity of matter, with pairs of hands manipulating or handling mystical, primal elements—the Orphic Egg with a serpent coiled around it, ready to birth the universe and a core deity that will spawn other gods; two tigers lifted from an Edo-period scroll painting, a labyrinth layered over them; threads or nerves connecting fingers with a human body, its vascular system revealed for the naked eye. A cicada appears too, bearing the significance of reincarnation. These elements and the backgrounds in these images meld in the same way our imaginations and memories go on overdrive during lysergic hallucinations, opening us to our surroundings completely, prompting intentional schizophrenia and a temporal slowdown for severe introspection.
That layering of time and geography became a staple in Tanaami’s artmaking. In the ’80s, he made multiple works that show Japanese pine trees and houses fusing into each other, at times featuring bestial aspects, with the artist using curves of the tree trunks and branching to stand in for the shifting geometries seen during intense trips. He continually honed these arrangements, jamming more information into his compositions. In Cherry Blossoms Falling in the Evening Gloom (2014), a mixed-media triptych that spans three meters, we see skulls distorted in at least two directions, a World War II-era fighter plane zipping away, an explosion somewhere ahead of us, tongues tangled with wooden tendrils, arachnid limbs, body horror—all of this in garish colors—and an all-seeing eye to unsettle anyone who may happen to have temporary paranoid tendencies. Pink cherry-blossom petals are carried into the uniform, inky-black backdrop, invoking the artist’s appreciation for Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 treatise In Praise of Shadows, in which the author dissects aesthetics by considering the beauty found in subtlety, tempered states and darkness.
Even more is packed into the diptych Mirror Surface (2015), with warped schoolgirl figures staring back, fangs bared. Eyes sprout from unreasonably, intricately arranged branches to unnerve and agitate. Two roosters—well, one rooster and the detached, floating head of another—reference the creations of 18th-century scroll painters, most notably Ito Jakuchu.
Tanaami still makes works that tackle his childhood experiences of war. Looking back, he manages to find flashes of beauty even in the direst moments when Tokyo was under attack. For instance, the artist recalls how illumination rounds would, for brief moments, cast an eerie glow over his field of vision. This was not optimism, but a survival mechanism for a boy who would eventually become one of Japan’s most influential, creative minds.
Brady Ng is ArtAsiaPacific’s Guangzhou desk editor.
Keiichi Tanaami’s solo exhibition is on view at Guangzhou chi K11 art space until September 2, 2018.
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