Last call! The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami is exhibiting the fabolous Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage, the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the renowned Japanese artist, until the 30th of March. Featuring works spanning from 1965 to 2024, this groundbreaking show showcases Tanaami’s ability to blend vibrant collage techniques with the surreal, drawing from both Japanese and American postwar culture. A pioneering figure in global Pop art, his work offers a stunning, kaleidoscopic view of a world shaped by war, desire, and the complexity of media.
Keiichi Tanaami’s art emerges from a deeply personal place: his experiences as a child during the Second World War and his upbringing in postwar Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1936, Tanaami’s memories are coloured by the trauma of air raids, evacuations, and the devastating destruction of his city. His work is a visual exploration of these formative experiences, combining images of American bombers, monsters, and surreal scenes of mass panic with references to Japan’s reconstitution after the war. A master of collage, Tanaami taps into both the dark and the playful aspects of popular culture to question the role of desire and violence in shaping societal consciousness. His use of commercial imagery, from advertisements to psychedellic graphics, creates vivid landscapes where horror and fascination coexist.
Tanaami’s career spans multiple media, but his early collages, made from clippings of Western and Japanese magazines, provide a fascinating lens through which to view the postwar media landscape. His work was a radical departure from traditional fine art, anticipating the crossover between commercial design and avant-garde creativity. Known for his bold, psychedellic animations, he also gained recognition in the 1960s as the first art director for Japanese Playboy and for designing album covers for Jefferson Airplane and The Monkees, bringing the burgeoning psychedellic culture to Japan.
Through a combination of painting, collage, and moving image, Tanaami’s work continually reflects on how mass media, advertising, and popular culture impact our perception of history. As he explores themes from manga to the works of Picasso, Tanaami’s later pieces, such as his Pleasure of Picasso series, show a continued engagement with appropriation, repetition, and the flattening of art and history in a hyper-commercialised age. Today, his innovative use of digital technology and large-scale paintings allows him to stretch the boundaries of his visual worlds, confronting the viewer with a perpetual flood of images and the weight of history.
The exhibition Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage is on view until the 30th of May at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 61 NE 41st Street, Miami, USA.
