DEME K IN MEMOR IES
In June 2018, during Keiichi Tanaami’s solo exhibition at the chi K11 art space in Guangzhou, the organization invited local children to construct standing structures made from photocopies of his artworks. Some kids handled papers featuring the Japanese pop artist’s mutated Betty Boop, her hair transformed into goldfish scales and squatting before a half-sunken American warplane. Others folded creases beside the feathers of a vacant-eyed rooster head, or pasted together skulls and rib cages sprouting from bonsai pine arrangements, with dozens of eyes floating behind them. The children seemed particularly interested in Tanaami’s totemic sculpture Body Decoration (2014), which features a caricatured Mickey Mouse head atop a skull sprouting legs balanced on the wings of a midcentury propeller plane.
Observing the scene, Tanaami was amused by how the children handled these macabre images without thinking too much about them—particularly since the images allude to the traumas of his own youth. Since he was a teenager, Tanaami’s signature style has been a blend of pop culture and low-brow entertainment with a complicated, at times contradictory, appraisal of Japanese postwar culture. By utilizing familiar cartoon, manga and Hollywood icons, he has investigated the havoc in his home country and the confusion in himself, from the traumatic aftereffects of the Second World War to an illness that almost ended his life nearly four decades ago.
Tanaami’s journey to become one of Japan’s first pop artists—and eventually having a role in shaping the country’s art scene through his artwork and as an educator—began before the outbreak of the war. Born in 1936 to a textile wholesaler in the Kyobashi neighborhood in Tokyo, Keiichi Tanaami was three months shy of turning six when the American military began bombing the city. His family moved him to his grandfather’s house in the residential Meguro ward to seek shelter, and away from his father’s textile shop, where an array of bright, delicate fabrics of every hue had populated his world. Instead, the smells, colors and sounds of devastation bombarded young Keiichi’s senses, (telescope-eyed goldfish) that his grandfather bred gave Tanaami something to focus on amid this chaos. During my visit to his studio in Japan, he recalled being hypnotized by the reflection of firebombs’ flames on the scales of the pop-eyed fish.
