Prolific is a word that hardly does justice to Keiichi Tanaami. Born in Tokyo in 1936, Tanaami has worked ceaselessly, imparting a lasting legacy on the landscape of Japanese Pop Art. He has been described as “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” but unlike Warhol, Tanaami’s works are consistently psychedelic; full of psychosexual undertones and hypercolorful memento mori that hint at a Freudian death drive.
The development of his personal brand of psychedelia can be traced back to two formative periods in his life: witnessing the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II and a four-month period in hospital recovering from pleurisy in 1981, marked by nightly hallucinations.
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