CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/5/2019

'Alternate worlds that surpass the imagination' in Keiichi Tanaami's early Pop collages

"I was tidying up at a warehouse in Setagaya one chilly day in 2012 during a heavy rain when I came upon a large stack of paper wrapped in old newspaper. I had no memory of these dusty old newspapers. When I peeled them open, there appeared more than 100 brightly colored collages. I had no idea as to how, when, or for what reason this group of works had been made, and though these were unmistakably works of my own, for a moment I could not even fathom why they would have lain dormant here, abandoned in a dark warehouse." So begins Keiichi Tanaami's essay in this exciting new collection of the artist's early Pop collages, which derive from materials left behind by Tanaami's uncle, who was killed during Japan's war with Burma. Tanaami describes a bookcase packed with photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, "photos of nude women in gymnastic formation and of nude men, and bizarre picture postcards whose surfaces were covered in embossed swastikas, which you could feel when you ran your fingers over them." This particular image (c. 1971) features the artist's one-time neighbor, the former-geisha-turned-actress Kogiku Hanayagi. Of all the collages, it induced the strongest sense of nostalgia, as a chance meeting with Hanayagi had provided Tanaami's "first conscious awareness of the opposite sex."