Keiichi Tanaami

Keiichi Tanaami (born 1936) is one of the most influential artists of Japan's postwar avant-garde. Among the country's first video artists, and a member of the Japanese Neo-Dada movement, Tanaami visited New York in the late 1960s and came face to face with the paintings of Andy Warhol. Having worked as a graphic designer, Tanaami was entranced by Warhol's amalgam of graphic and fine arts, and began to make drawings and collages that blended psychedelic kitsch with traditional Japanese arts, in a style that quickly led to album covers for the Monkees and Jefferson Airplane. This volume collects Tanaami's erotic, surreal and cartoonish drawings and collages from these years, when the artist was most steeped in American pop culture, just before he became art director for the Japanese Playboy. The dust jacket folds out into a large black-and-white poster.