The biographical blurb on Keiichi Tanaami's webpage begins, "A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person."
"Keiichi Tanaami Dialogue" at the Kyoto ddd gallery is all about the graphic designer/animator/artist's formative and long-explored experiences at an extremity of pop culture. His sometimes innocent, sometimes pornographic, influences percolated, exploded and re-formed in multiple and mutant ways in a career that took off in the 1960s and is still going strong. The exhibition's 20-odd recent prints and animation clips, earlier sculptures and collaborations with apparel brands, and stacks of books, magazines and tableware products, amount to an almost spiritual overview of his occupations.
Tanaami was stamped with indelible impressions during his childhood. Relocating to his grandfather's house in Tokyo's Meguro Ward while the city was being firebombed during World War II, visual spectacles were burned into his consciousness: the capital in flames, the citizenry fleeing and searchlights desperately scanning the skies for American bombers.