Hammer Projects: Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami at the Hammer Museum

A series of collaborative works by artists Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami represents a world populated by Japanese idols, monsters, and ancient deities set amid icons from popular Japanese “bullet hell” arcade games. In a suite of collages, Payne and Tanaami merge their distinct artistic sensibilities with histories of desire and consumption into a single hallucinatory fantasy. As a progenitor of Japanese Pop art in the late 1960s, Tanaami has been an influential figure in postwar Japan, impacting the ways in which many artists, including Payne, consider their work in relation to forms of popular culture. In particular, Payne focuses on characteristics of video game culture that are analogous to broader social and philosophical concepts. Thus, the collaboration reflects a wider cultural exchange of ideas that Tanaami—as part of an international pop movement—has played an instrumental role in developing.