Artist Keiichi Tanaami Has Spent His Life Defining Consumer Society — And Being Defined by It | 100 People With Ideas

What was pop art really expressing? What could it express?

Keiichi Tanaami, an 82-year-old Japanese artist, is hard to file under one job title. He was the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy, has done commercial collaborations and merchandise design for fashion brands, designed album covers for British rock bands, and made experimental animated shorts. He is considered a pioneer of Japanese visual art, with a lasting influence on pop art and avant-garde culture.

On June 15, Tanaami opened a solo show at Guangzhou K11, with more than 40 representative works including paintings and installations. He is less well known in China than Yayoi Kusama or Takashi Murakami, but the show still drew a crowd.

Describing Tanaami's work isn't easy. Unlike Andy Warhol, he doesn't give you anything as clean and legible as a Marilyn Monroe portrait or a Campbell's soup can. He is better known for collage — roosters, goldfish, American pin-up girls recur across many pieces, brilliantly colored and hard to read.

In the experimental animated short Adventures in Beauty Wonderland, Tanaami lays out a strange, lurid world. It opens with Edvard Munch's The Scream, except the screaming figure has been swapped for a warped Betty Boop. What follows is a "Noh play" performed by dozens of heavily made-up women, ringed by eyeballs and cherry blossoms, with artillery shells dropping in now and then.

Yayoi Kusama has a neurological condition that produces hallucinations and turns them into polka dots. Tanaami says much the same thing about his own work: this is simply the world as he sees it — a Japanese society shaped by America, an economy running on eyeballs, consumption above all.

He has even built a warped Mickey Mouse "Buddha": Disney's Mickey, seated in the posture of a traditional Buddha statue, in the form of the thousand-armed Guanyin — a thing that fits no category and looks wrong. For Tanaami, that may be exactly where reality turns absurd. What people chase today is this very contradiction: a modern, Westernized life, commercial success, women treated as goods — a view even women themselves have taken up.

Most of these loaded collage elements come out of Tanaami's childhood.

He was born in 1936 in Tokyo, into a family that wholesaled suit fabric. The mountains of trademark labels piled up at home were his toys — bright embroidery, flying dragons, paradise islands, camels. Reworking such ready-made, image-laden objects is one of pop art's most common methods.

In the war's early years, Tokyo went untouched. Tanaami grew up in Meguro, and near his kindergarten stood Meguro Gajoen, Japan's first all-in-one wedding hall. With its reliefs of beautiful women and its palace-style columns, it was lavish past all measure; people called it "the Dragon Palace of the Showa era." Tanaami often slipped off to play there, though his teachers warned him it was "a place where spirits come out."

His uncle kept a set of Nazi postcards, mixed in with photos of sexy film stars and nudes.

These scraps of memory, all appetite and hormones, were cut off by the war.

In 1945, American planes bombed Tokyo. The family hid in a shelter they had dug themselves; Tanaami was nine. What has stayed with him most sharply is the goldfish his grandfather kept in a tank. Before dropping their bombs, the American planes would fire flares to fix the target. "It was a lionhead goldfish" — he still remembers the breed — and under the flares' glaring light its scales threw back a "strange beauty."

Children and adults took the war in differently. Tanaami still remembers watching kamishibai, paper theater, on the burned-out streets of Tokyo, more than fifty children lining up in the rubble to see it.

Against that stood the bombed streets themselves: scorched earth, ruins, the severed limbs of the maimed. "My understanding of the war came through how the people around me reacted to it. I was very young, and my mother would cover my eyes and lead me by the hand past the bodies."

Roosters are another element he returns to, and they also come from the war. After the air raids, the family was evacuated from Tokyo to Niigata Prefecture, far out in the country, where they lodged with a farming family. Whenever an American B-29 passed over, the farm's chickens knew before the people did: they went wild, shaking their fire-red combs. For Tanaami red was never a gorgeous color. It was tied to fear.

Rather than paint the real world head-on, he would rather dig into his own memory. In that memory, the war and the world after it were exactly this strange, exactly this absurd.

It is also the collective memory of his postwar generation — not just the economic recovery, but the American presence that came with it and got in everywhere.

That is where the Pinocchio, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and sunglasses-wearing modern women in his collages come from. Postwar Japanese cinemas showed a carefully picked selection of American films: features with classic Hollywood plots, American heroes saving beautiful women, plus the B-movies full of monsters, violence, and sex that young people loved. For Tanaami's generation, the real childhood pleasure was the animated shorts screened between features.

"Yes, that's a kind of brainwashing," Tanaami says — but he also calls it one of the few "happy experiences" his generation got.

Like many Japanese people, Tanaami feels more than one way about America. The 1960s and '70s were the golden age of American pop art, and he made a special trip to New York to visit Andy Warhol. He was struck by the conditions and the range his American peers worked with; he was also sure that what he wanted was not simply American pop. Bright color contrasts, ready-made objects lifted from mass consumption, reproducibility — those were only techniques. He was still working out what he actually wanted to say.

At the Guangzhou K11 show, you can see how his work shifted over time. The early pieces are full of Western advertising women, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple; the later ones gradually fold in Osamu Tezuka and Yoko Ono.

In 1980 he came to China for the first time, and began working Eastern motifs into his art — pine-and-crane paintings, sunrise over Penglai.

In literature and in art, Japanese creators like to talk about life and death, and Tanaami is no exception. In 1981 he caught tuberculosis and spent four months in hospital. Every day, after his injections, he ran a high fever in the middle of the night and hallucinated. A friend visiting him brought a Dalí art book. He recalls that he hadn't cared much for Dalí before, but over months of half-sleep he often felt the clock on the wall melting halfway down, just as Dalí had painted it, along with pines twisting and curling. That near-death stretch shaped his later, more psychedelic work. People started calling him Japan's "visual magician."

In a conversation with the show's curator, Venus Lau, Tanaami said his art is not postwar trauma therapy, nothing like treating PTSD; he is more interested in working out what postwar Japanese society and the Japanese people have in common. He compared the process to his early years editing for Playboy: set memories side by side, personal or collective, recombine them, and you start to see what is shaping Japan today.

Unlike glossy, bright American pop, Tanaami says, Japanese pop art carries a certain "smell of the soil." Partly that came from what the artists had to work with: young Japanese artists had no money for good pigments, so they built their work out of scavenged trash and scrap. Partly it came from the content. After copying the outward form, what Tanaami was painting was still Japan.

He doesn't even count himself a pure "pop artist" — pop, to him, is one way of saying something. This show leaves out his experimental animation; from the 1950s and '60s he worked on film with Yoji Kuri, founder of Japan's animation group.

Early British and American pop artists were fairly serious too. The work that made Richard Hamilton's name, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, was pointedly ironic. He cut his material out of newspapers, ads, and picture magazines and assembled what a modern home was supposed to look like: a contemporary apartment, a chiseled nude man, a sexy nude woman, plus a tape recorder, a television, a vacuum cleaner — a prepackaged "modern" way of life, which is to say consumerism.

Pop art started out critical of consumerism and turned into a mass consumer party of its own — much as, in recent years, critics have attacked another Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami, for selling off pop art's "soul" outright.

So what is that "soul"? In 2015, Tate Modern tried to answer with a show called The World Goes Pop. For a long time, when people said pop they meant only America and Britain; this show brought in more work from the "margins." What were the artists there using pop to say?

Tanaami was in that group show. So was the French artist Bernard Rancillac, with a piece about women and contraception. The Spanish artist collective Equipo Crónica's 1969 work Social Realism and Pop Art in the Battlefield is about as plain a political metaphor as you can get: cans, gunfire, soldiers, all set against a jungle. In the Icelandic artist Erró's American Interior No. 1, a soldier with Asian features stands outside the window of a bourgeois household, gun ready, waiting; the soldier is in red, the room behind the glass is off-white, and the hard color contrast carries the confrontation.

In 2015, the art critic Thomas Crow published The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995, arguing that people have long been wrong to assume pop is easy to understand.

Through the 1960s and '70s the world had no shortage of things worth resisting, and people used pop art's bright colors and its knack for travelling fast to protest military dictatorship, the Cold War, gender inequality, the Vietnam War, and totalitarianism.

Several big exhibitions in recent years have tried to trace pop art's value again, among them "Overpop," held at Shanghai's Yuz Museum in 2016.

For dealers and galleries, this pop "revival" also has commercial value: the hope is to rediscover a batch of underrated pop artists. In 2008, Andy Warhol's Eight Elvises sold for more than $100 million — but a great many pop artists remain obscure, and so does their work.

Tanaami is one of them. The Japanese art historian Hiroki Ikegami has said that galleries did not pull his work back out of storage until 2012.

This is the first solo show by an international artist at Guangzhou K11 since it opened this past March; K11 is known for building art spaces inside shopping malls. "Art isn't some rarefied thing," Tanaami says. "If it's too far from ordinary people, art has no future."

This K11 sits in Guangzhou's Zhujiang New Town, once an urban village, torn down and rebuilt into skyscrapers and plazas; K11 has become a favorite spot for the city's young people to check in and take photos. Compared with puzzling out the obscure meanings in this Japanese artist's work, or hunting for pop's "soul," posing for a selfie against these colorful paintings and installations is a good deal easier.

(Cover image: NOWNESS; the long-format cover image was provided by Guangzhou K11, copyright Keiichi Tanaami and NANZUKA.)