Keiichi Tanaami: I’M THE ORIGIN

Daelim Museum will hold a large-scale special exhibition of Keiichi Tanaami, an artist who has gained worldwide fame as a pioneer in Asian pop art, for the first time in Korea from Dec. 14, 2024 to June 29, 2025. The exhibition Keiichi Tanaami: I’M THE ORIGIN will showcase the artist's entire creative journey, covering the artist's various works.

Daelim Museum has introduced creators from all over the world to the domestic public quickly and in-depth so that anyone can easily understand and enjoy art in daily life based on its vision as an art museum “where daily life becomes art”. Daelim Museum, which has introduced creators who cross various fields by destroying the boundaries of art, such as Ryan McGinley, Coco Capitan, Jaime Hayon, and MSCHF, will announce Keiichi Tanami, who has pioneered his own world without being bound by genre or traditional rules, for the first time in Korea in 2024.

Recognized as a pioneer of Asian pop art and called the Andy Warhol of the East, Keiichi Tanaami refers to himself as an "Image Director" and has pioneered an original path that flexibly crosses the boundaries of "upper" and "lower," "Oriental" and "Western."

The exhibition provides a special opportunity to meet works created through experimental challenges such as paintings, collages, sculptures, animations, videos, and installations produced by applying the methods and techniques developed as artists from the beginning of their activities to the present day. Also, all the vast variety of works that Keiichi Tanami has produced throughout his life, including works produced through collaboration with international brands.

In particular, the exhibition, which is the largest ever since the opening of the Daelim Museum of Art by expanding its space next door to the museum, will cover a total of 700 major works over the past 60 years of the artist's life, including the "NO MORE WAR Series" (1967-2024), a silk screen influenced by American comics and pop art, "Good-by Marilyn (1971)," which has a unique interpretation of American pop culture, "The Story of Death and Rebirth (2019), which is a motif of memories experienced as a child, and "Pleasure of Picasso - Mother and Child Series (2020)," which was consistently produced during the pandemic, and "Inconceivable Body (2019), which depicts a sculpture full of life by mixing bizarre-shaped creatures.

Keiichi Tanaami is an artist who has been active in various fields, including art directors, experimental filmmakers, animators, graphic artists, and designers, and his original work became the forerunner of the Superflat art movement that later led to Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara. The artist's work is in the collection of numerous art museums, including MoMA (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Art Institute of Chicago, M+(Hong Kong), National Portrait Gallery (Washington) and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin).

This special exhibition by the Daelim Museum will provide a special opportunity to fully experience the world of Keiichi Tanaami’s work. It will confirm the creative journey of the artist who has built his own utopia based on colorful colors by flexibly crossing the boundaries of subjects and media such as postwar culture, mass media, memories and dreams, death and paradise throughout his life.