Remembering Keiichi Tanaami’s surreal grotesqueries

Last November, the National Art Center, Tokyo, announced the world’s first large-scale retrospective dedicated to the works of Japanese Pop Art pioneer Keiichi Tanaami. “Adventures in Memory” opened on Aug. 7, a loud and sweeping show with 11 “chapters” dedicated to the postwar designer and artist’s 60-year career. Though he worked passionately on the show, involved in everything from the planning to the PR, Tanaami never saw the exhibit in person. Two days after the opening, he died from a subarachnoid hemorrhage that had occurred in late July. He was 88.
The exhibit was likely not intended to be posthumous, but the ambiguity is unsettling. Tanaami’s gallerist, Shinji Nanzuka, didn’t announce his death until Aug. 20, meaning that for 13 days his studio’s Instagram account continued to post about the artist’s collaborations with the likes of Barbie, as if everything were business as usual. Now with hindsight, these bardo social media posts seem to hint at the fact that Tanaami had always been preoccupied with death — as if the reality of his passing had no effect on the fantasies of his imagination.
The prologue to the exhibition features two works completed in 2024, a sculpture and digital print both titled “A Hundred Bridges,” which now read as bridges to the last testament of the departed artist.
“If a bridge is a boundary between the secular and the sacred, separating this world and the world of the afterlife, it can also be a place of encounter,” Tanaami wrote in the introductory text. “One wonders who sings the song that echoes mysteriously from the other side of the bridge. I would like to find out.”

Tanaami was born in 1936 in Tokyo and was 9 years old when he witnessed the U.S. military’s ruinous firebombing raid on his home city. His family fled to Niigata, and when they returned, he recalls seeing a destroyed Meguro Station. The blue sky contrasted against the red, burning earth left an intense impression on the young Tanaami, and the stark divide of red and blue later suffused his work.
The theme of war never left Tanaami, weighing heavily on his art throughout his life, both explicitly and implicitly. His flat works of ink, collage and silkscreen, popping with saturated color, contain dense war imagery — knives, rockets, bombs, guns, soldiers and fighter pilots, as well as bloody organs and jammed orifices — exploding with motion. But the horrors of large-scale violence meet the humor and whimsy of the postwar years. The NACT exhibit creates a feeling of senseless chaos but seen through a logical worldview in which kawaii and grotesque, and fantasy and nightmare, are all one.
The exhibit shows the sheer volume of Tanaami’s creative output. He argued that printed works were actually originals, and indeed many of the images are repetitive, and some of the frames are mounted far too high above the ground for anyone to reasonably look at, which has the effect of emphasizing size and quantity over individual quality.
The scenes are not only violent but aggressively erotic. Underneath the brightness and silliness of the galleries, male virility and vulgarity pulse through the works. Pornographic posters of female bodies in various states of enticement and exploitation are satirical but also gleeful, leading viewers from Tanaami’s early years as a graphic designer after graduating from Musashino Art University and into his role as the first art director of Playboy magazine’s Japan edition. Lots of figures (women) were the subject of his irreverence — Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Yoko Ono, Twiggy, Jane Fonda — as part of a greater ambivalence he showed toward the commercial, image-dense, mass-media era during which he came of age as an artist.

Tanaami was antiwar, and the shadow of the U.S. raids influenced so much of his work. But he was also obsessed with American culture. He watched American films as a child, cited Andy Warhol as a major influence and described a trip to New York in 1968 as a turning point in his life.
“I repeatedly heard my parents talk about how America was the enemy, so I naturally had a negative view of the country,” he said in a 2022 interview. “But I fell in love with the country as I started watching films that captured what made America so good, such as those by Disney and the Fleischer Brothers.”
Tanaami disagreed with the idea that an artist should be relegated to just one genre; along with posters, paintings, sculptures and fashion collaborations, he also made animations and experimental films. Inspired by filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas and alongside illustrators and animators like Yoji Kuri, Tadanori Yokoo and Makoto Wada, Tanaami made films that gave life to the motion inherent in his still images.

His surreal animations seem infused with laughing gas and psychedelics, full of mania and loopiness. They indict the ubiquitous commercial symbols of the time being broadcasted from the U.S. to the world — Disney, Betty Boop, hamburgers, Coca Cola — as much as they relish in them. Tanaami’s films are less bright, more roughly drawn and dreamy, cellular dots becoming googly eyes becoming nipples and ears growing phalluses on the run.
Tanaami was disciplined and incredibly prolific, waking and sleeping every day at the exact same time to keep his regimen in order, and he had no hobbies other than walking. He was meticulous: For 20 years, he kept a diary of his dreams and memories in vivid detail. For a large composite painting, which today’s Stable Diffusion-addled eye might guess were AI generated, he would hand draw 100 individual figures and then combine them. He also kept a large reserve of different eye drawings at the ready, which he would fit into his pieces based on what was suitable for each individual figure.
“I never redo things,” he told art and culture site Post-Fake projects. “I don’t waste time thinking. The idea comes in a flash, so it’s best to finish the painting right then … I’m truest to myself when I work fast. Paintings are unforgiving.”
During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tanaami needed a way of dealing with his disrupted schedule, so he made “copies” of Picasso paintings — more than 400. At the NACT exhibit, the small frames cover the walls of one of the gallery spaces, a rare departure from Tanaami’s themes.

Perhaps part of the aura surrounding Tanaami in his later years when he began to gain traction outside Japan was the discrepancy between his physical form and his art: a slight, elderly man in glasses and a beanie, dwarfed by trippy depictions of colorful, eye-popping vulgarities beside him. When Tanaami was 45, he had a severe bout of tuberculosis that put him in the hospital for four months. He had nightly hallucinations of Salvador Dali’s “The Madonna of Port Lligat” — and about his own death. “Ever since, I’ve thought about death obsessively on a daily basis,” he told Post-Fake projects 42 years later.
“I don’t think about life and death in such a logical way, but it’s true the concept of ‘death’ has become attached to my life. Since it’s stuck with me, I can’t separate from it now, so maybe that’s how I’d describe it,” he said in 2022. “It’s like I’m wearing a garment called ‘death’ that I can never take off, so I have no choice but to depict it.”
At Tanaami’s now posthumous retrospective, the viewer, too, has no choice but to confront the artist’s specter.