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1. NO MORE WAR

Keiichi Tanaami was born in 1936 into a family running a wholesale textile business in Kyobashi, Tokyo. He was deeply marked by the harrowing images of death he witnessed in early childhood during World War II, and these experiences profoundly influence his work to this day. As a youth, he immersed himself in the American popular culture then flooding into Japan, such as Hollywood films and comic books, as well as Japanese boys’ manga, and he began developing his own artistic talents in high school. Tanaami enrolled in the　Department of Design at Musashino Art School (now Musashino Art University), and subsequently connected with like-minded artists such as Ushio Shinohara (b. 1932), who remains a friend today, and Tomio Miki (1938–1978) and Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014), all of whom shared an “anti-art” ethos. Tanaami won a special selection award for a poster at the Japan Advertising Artists Club Exhibition in 1957, leading to professional design opportunities and growing career momentum while he was still a student. After graduation he worked in the advertising branch of the major agency Hakuhodo, but after approximately two years there, a growing number of outside commissions led him to opt for a freelance design career.

Tanaami was inspired by Andy Warhol’s interdisciplinary approach, and became fascinated with the potential of printed matter as an artistic medium capable of duplication and proliferation. In 1965, he exhibited a silkscreen series titled ORDER MADE!! (cat. 1-55), heavily influenced by Pop Art, at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery. The following year he published an artist’s book titled A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami, and through his own practice he advocated the idea that printed works are not merely copies but a set of numerous originals. In 1968 he served as art director of the psychedelic discotheque Killer Joe’s in Ginza, Tokyo. Meanwhile he steadily rose to prominence, drawing acclaim when his work NO MORE WAR won a prize in an antiwar poster competition organized by the counterculture-oriented American magazine Avant Garde. Throughout his career Tanaami has worked as a graphic designer, producing magazine layouts and illustrations, while concurrently creating his own works in the context of fine art. His protean practice has led him to describe himself as an “image director.” Tanaami’s fluid movement among multiple realms of art and design has made him a pioneer of the contemporary multidisciplinary artist paradigm, and he has been a trailblazing figure from the dawn of his career until the present day.