Miami Art Week Opens With Keiichi Tanaami at ICA

A series of works by Keiichi Tanaami from the early 1970s installed at ICA

MIAMI – As Miami prepares for the annual circus of modern art excess that is Art Basel, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is getting a jump on the fray with a long-overdue solo show of work by the late Japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami, who brought western psychedelia and U.S. pop art sensibilities to Japan in the 1960s.

"Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage" – his first U.S. solo museum exhibition – comes just months after the pop art influencer passed away in August at the age of 88. The showcase of Tanaami's maximalist vision is neither too little, nor too late.

The time and place feel almost right, in fact. Tanaami's technicolor explosions of memory and imagination arrive just as the art world is descending on Miami for its annual bacchanal. And his work, with its acid-bright palette and fever-dream combinations of American pop culture, Japanese folklore, and wartime memories, seems perfectly at home in a city that treats neon as a neutral color.

“We hope that the exhibition will be something of a surprise,” Gean Moreno, director of the Art + Research Center at the ICA Miami, told Whitehot.

“It is, after all, the first U.S. museum show dedicated to Tanaami, and only his second survey ever. It offers a panoramic view of a practice that pioneered the crossover…between high art and commercial design, between pop culture and art history, and between technological production and personal voice,” said Moreno, who co-curated the exhibition with Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director at the ICA.

The exhibition traces Tanaami's extraordinary personal and artistic evolution, which had its nascence amid the terrifying radioactive fog of nuclear war. Though Tanaami fled Tokyo with his mother in 1943, the massive U.S. air raids and subsequent nuclear attacks that came two years later left an indelible mark on the then-nine-year-old boy. 

Keiichi Tanaami Untitled (Collagebook7_18), 1969

Tanaami is best known for his collages, but his oeuvre is itself a collage that draws on his diverse and unusual life experiences. “We see, again and again, U.S. fighter planes, monsters, distorted and fragmented bodies processed into hallucinatory and all-encompassing landscapes. But what makes the work even more complex is that Tanaami’s war memories mix with the world that is flowering around him: psychedelic culture, the sexual revolution and the explosion of a repressed eroticism, the commercialization of everyday life and the urban space,” Moreno said.   

After graduating from Musashino Art University in 1960 with a degree in graphic design, Tanaami straddled the worlds of commercial art and fine art, often blending Japanese and Western influences. He served as the first art director of Japanese Playboy and created psychedelic record covers for 1968 Japanese releases of Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s and the Monkees’ Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

As the sixties gave way to the seventies, Tanaami’s practice flourished, with collage as his principal medium.

“All the collages of the early seventies seem to me to be held together by the tension between the war memories that Tanaami can’t fully repress and the immense explosion of media – printed, but also audiovisual – that he was immersed in,” Moreno said. “We should keep in mind that Tanaami is not just an observer of this explosion, but functions in the middle of it, producing album covers, anti-war posters, and countercultural publications,” he added. 

The exhibition's centerpiece spans the ICA's central gallery – a series of monumentally scaled recent works that feel like career retrospectives compressed. Here are all his signature motifs: the synthetic colors that pop against darker themes, the sexual imagery that permeates decades of work, and the endless exploration of how popular culture commercializes the desire to suppress the devastation of war.

"Memory Collage" also showcases Tanaami's mastery across media, from his collages to his surreal animations that have become classics of avant-garde film. His iconic 1970s paintings combine idyllic landscapes with advertising and anti-war slogans, while later works quote sources as diverse as the 16th-century French School of Fontainebleau and traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

The show gives special attention to Tanaami's recent period of remarkable productivity, including his "Pleasure of Picasso" series, which playfully examines the role of the legendary artist in today's visual culture through technical appropriation and repetition. These digitally printed, visually saturated paintings reflect on the contemporary regime of pervasive images while never losing sight of history's persistent specter.

There's something almost subversive about the ICA's decision to showcase an artist who spent his career blurring the lines between commercial and fine art, between East and West, and between personal memory and collective history as Miami gears up for another Art Basel week of parties and pop-ups.

Although this is only the first solo museum exhibition of his work, Tanaami’s value has not been lost on renowned museums across the globe. Adding his work to their collections in recent years: MoMA (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Art Institute of Chicago, M+ (Hong Kong), the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.) and Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin). The Miami show also coincides with the release of a new 256-page hardback monograph from Rizzoli that spans Tanaami’s career.

The Tanaami exhibition is one of five being brought to the design district by the ICA around Miami Art Week. The others include the first U.S. solo museum presentation for rising abstract painter Lucy Bull; a showcase of two critical series by Rubem Valentim, a key figure in Afro-diasporic art; a new immersive installation by interdisciplinary artist Marguerite Humeau; and an installation of new works by Ding Shilun. 

Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage opened Nov. 21 and runs through March 30 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 61 NE 41st Street in Miami’s Design District. 

The following piece was originally published by Whitehot Magazine.