A huge gallery of acrylic and silkscreen prints and deeply primary-colored wood, steel and lacquer sculptures represent the artist’s recollections of his 1980 trip to China. He was greatly energized by the country’s natural landscapes, and ancient Chinese folk beliefs that included immortal wizards and mystical elements.

Gallery view, Keiichi Tanaami, Artificial Paradise. Photo: Alma Reyes

Keiichi Tanaami, Law of the Forest, 2024

The Tokiwa-matsu series (1986) show considerable versions of the pine tree, which symbolized good fortune and juvenile, exotic memories. The playful The House in Ascension (1987) and The Furniture in Ascension (2004) and prints, such as Law of the Forest (2024), were products of Tanaami’s hallucinations of an artificial paradise during his four-month hospitalization due to tuberculosis and pleurisy in 1981 at age 45. He jumbled Asian symbols, like tigers and elephants with Buddhist relics and sexual imagery of nudes and phallic forms. They turned into building blocks like those he used to play as a child. One senses a feeling of eeriness and hysteric. He lamented, “…I had lost confidence and passion for my work. I spent my days in indolence and apathy, and then this immense punishment came down upon me from the heavens… I found a connection between being conscious of death so close to myself and to being alive, and that became the powerful energy that supported my creativity.”

Keiichi Tanaami, Presence, 2022

Keiichi Tanaami, The Labyrinth of Arcimboldo, 2024. Photo: Alma Reyes

A large scope of Tanaami’s masterpieces stemmed from what he called “memory verification.” From around 1990, he focused on drawings with detailed notes at the back, documenting episodes, characters and animals he had remembered from his young days, or from books and films. He was also obsessed with recording his dreams since his teen years.

Memory Reconstruction, installation view of the exhibition “Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Reconstruction,” NANZUKA, Tokyo, 2020 © Keiichi Tanaami / Courtesy of NANZUKA

A digital canvas print, Presence (2022), and two installations — The Labyrinth of Arcimboldo (2024), a wooden structure resembling his studio, and Memory Reconstruction (2020), a glass-encased greenhouse — explode with mazes of dream collages linked with wartime visions, Hollywood actresses, famous art subjects, and other objects that pull the visitor into the artist’s mental circuit of pandemonium. He explained, “I think these memories, changing daily as if at their own convenience, greatly sway who I am. There is an accepted belief that ‘memories lie’, but false memory to me is just another truth.”