Keiichi Tanaami

The first comprehensive English-language monograph on Keiichi Tanaami’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, which merges Japanese postwar culture and American-style comics with a genre-defining artistic output.

Artist, illustrator, graphic designer, filmmaker, and art director, Keiichi Tanaami is best known for his psychedelic creations that reach to the farthest corners of the mind. Since the 1960s, he has been composing works on paper, magazine covers, and phantasmagoric large-scale paintings as a response to his traumatic experience of living through the United States’ atomic attack on Japan during World War II. He’s since made a mark on the world, exhibiting across the globe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yokohama Museum of Art, M+, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others.

Tanaami’s work is marked by an unexpectedly harmonic blend of eroticism, surrealism, psychedelia, and American comic art, combined with pointed discourse on politics, consumerism, and pop culture. Although he has been memorialized in print form within a number of smaller, themed publications, this book is the first English-language artist retrospective, a long-awaited and highly anticipated volume.

This exceptional publication, printed on multiple papers, is divided into five modules, each opened by a background introduction to the artist's key themes—Eros, Underground, Pop, Tradition, and Landscape—offering a new, exhilarating lens through which to see the legendary artist’s oeuvre.

Keiichi Tanaami is one of the leading pop artists of postwar Japan. Alessio Ascari is the creative director of Kaleidoscope and Capsule, art and design publications based in Milan. He is also the head of programming at Spazio Maiocchi. Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City.