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Public Talk by Namiko Kunimoto on Keiichi Tanaami: Commercial War
Coming of age in postwar Japan filled with memories of devastation, with a vibrant psychedelic culture and the sexual revolution in full swing and an economic boom afoot, Keiichi Tanaami proved to be one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1960s. This presentation will delve into the artist’s work in relation to the social and artistic trends of the times. It will look at Tanaami’s dynamic movement across media like animation and collage and his connections to Andy Warhol and Tsujimura Kazuko. It will ask how the emergent visual landscape of the 1960s altered one’s sense of the political, the spiritual, and the psychic, and explore how Tanaami offered very specific and profound answers to these questions.
About Namiko Kunimoto
Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in diasporic art, gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She is the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art.
Her essays include “Olympic Labor and Displacement: Babel and Its Towers” in Review of Japanese Art and Culture, (2023), “Art in Transwar Japan” ThirdText (2022), Situating “Becoming a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman:’ Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism” Verge: Studies in Global Asia, (2022) “Tsujimura Kazuko and the Body Object” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus (2021), and “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” in Art Journal (2019). Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), Ishibashi Foundation Fellowship (2021), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award (2017), and the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2019). Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published in February 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press and she is currently working on her next book, Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art, forthcoming in 2026 from the University of California Press.
