Art That Came from the Design Side
There is the route that runs from art school to the museum, and then there are the people who came in from the working world of advertising and illustration. Both of these two were recognized abroad first and entered Japanese museums afterward. Tanaami Keiichi was born in 1936. He made his first animation in 1965, and in 1975 he became the founding art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy. His pictures are saturated with color, goldfish and eyeballs and skulls turning in a spiral. Those goldfish have a source. In 1945, when he was nine, he lived through more than a hundred air raids at the place his family had been evacuated to, and the goldfish in his grandfather's pond caught the light of the flares and glittered. That is his own explanation. All that gaudiness was a memory of the war. On 7 August 2024 the first large-scale retrospective of his work anywhere in the world opened at the National Art Center, Tokyo. Two days later, he died. Sorayama Hajime was born in 1947. He left an advertising agency to go freelance, and around 1978 he painted a robot for the first time, for a Suntory advertisement. The name Sexy Robot was not given by him; it was given by the editor-in-chief who published a book of his work. The metallic sheen he builds with the airbrush looks more like metal than a photograph does. In 1999 he designed the Sony AIBO, which entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. This map has a band that describes how Pop Art came out of advertising. In Japan that same road ran a little longer and a little later. (Tanaami is often written up as a forerunner of Superflat, but he was not a member of Murakami Takashi's movement. He had been working the same flatness for decades before the theory arrived.)