Keiichi Tanaami, an influential artist who used the imagery of Pop art in his maximalist prints, sculptures and films to process the trauma of postwar Japan, died on August 9 from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome and a sudden subarachnoid hemorrhage. He was 88.

His Japanese gallery Nanzuka announced his death on August 20. Shinji Nanzuka, the gallery’s chief director, said in a statement: “I am sure that Tanaami’s soul will live on forever in this paradise he himself built, and that he will enjoy his time with his wife, his friends, and all the strange yet wonderful creatures and monsters that inhabit it.”

Tanaami’s death was also reported by ARTnews‘s Japanese subsidiary.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Tanaami developed a unique body of work that responded to the aftermath of World War II, using a range of symbols and images from the media. He began producing animations in which Coke bottles became phallic symbols and Marilyn Monroe became the Statue of Liberty. It is no wonder that American pop artists such as Andy Warhol were interested in Tanaami’s art.

There is something much darker in many of these works, with their bright colors and ironic humor. His 1975 animated film Colored Pencil Angelfor example, seemed similar to pop art, as symbols associated with Japanese commercial products were quickly inserted everywhere. But these images appear alongside real war footage, giving all this psychedelia a darker tone.

He continued his baroque art until the end of his career, exhibiting rhinestone-encrusted paintings at New York’s Venus Over Manhattan gallery in 2022, cobbling together flaming eyes, busty women, figures from art history paintings and more. “I don’t have any low points,” Tanaami told the New York Times this year.

In the end, he was proven right – he died while a retrospective was being shown at the National Art Center in Tokyo, and his first American exhibition was to follow in December at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. According to Nanzuka’s testimony, Tanaami had intended to continue working before his health deteriorated.

Keiichi Tanaami was born in Tokyo in 1936 to a textile merchant and a housewife. When Tokyo was subjected to heavy bombing by the United States in 1945, Tanaami’s family moved to Meguro. From Meguro, Tanaami witnessed air raids and other military actions that would influence his art many years later. He described his inability to tell which disturbing images he had actually seen and which he had imagined.

In the years following World War II, Tanaami became a voracious consumer of American culture, attending screenings of the many Hollywood films that came to Japan. All the Disney and horror films he saw stuck in his mind when he was a design student at Musashino Art University. After graduating, he went into the world of advertising and design.

But he said he found the more traditional parts of the industry “boring” and decided to do something a little more offbeat instead. He designed anti-Vietnam War posters and album covers for Jefferson Airplane and the Monkees. And he became the first art director of playboy‘s Japanese edition.

The animations and prints he produced clearly bore the hallmarks of Pop, but he denied affiliation with the movement. “I never saw myself as a Pop artist,” he said in a 2015 interview with Tate Modern, which included his work in a global Pop Art survey that year. “However, when I was young, there was a time when I was influenced by the methods and techniques of Pop artists like Warhol. That’s perhaps why I was categorized as a Pop artist.”

The hallucinations that appear in many of his artworks were experienced by him in 1981 when he was hospitalized for tuberculosis. The visions he had eventually influenced his works created in the following years, which were based on calm images similar to those in Hiroshige’s prints and then reworked in neon reds and greens.

His phantasmagorical images eventually found a new audience in the luxury fashion world. Tanaami worked on commission for brands such as Moncler and Stussy, designing T-shirts and jackets.

Some of his recent contributions to art history used canonical images that Tanaami filtered through his own style. During the pandemic, he continually copied Picasso’s “Mother and Child” paintings and occasionally added manga characters borrowed from Osamu Tezuka’s work. Tanaami told the New York Times that he “didn’t particularly like Picasso” when he started this project. But in the end, “I grew to like him.”