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This is the third artwork in the Revolver collection of print works produced using a gravure printing press.
(pre-sale on this site by lottery. They will also be sold in galleries and at other locations.)
What is staring at us with green eyes?
Born in 1936, Tanaami experienced the air raids in Tokyo. Searchlights illuminating the night sky. The sound of American bombers. His grandfather's oddly shaped goldfish swimming in a glowing aquarium, shimmering in the light of the flares and bombs... Here, the girl is gradually transformed, like noise passing through the scan lines of a television set.
Tanaami has depicted goldfish with bumps on their heads in a variety of ways. The creature depicted here also has scales and fins. But it seems to have evolved into a new kind of creature not only with lips, two front teeth, and a large tongue, but also four hands adorned with red nail polish.
She (?) unfurls a thin green cloth with both hands, as if she were performing a magic trick. Lettering that Tanaami selected from Akatsuka's manga pour out from the cloth. They are the phonetics used to express various sound effects, including screams and explosions. The phonetic symbols, surrounded, shadowed, cracked, and deformed, are further colored by Tanaami, evolving into expressions with a unique sense of materiality.
Waving her hand from an elliptical frame in the top right is Akko-chan, the protagonist of Himitsu no Akko-chan, which was serialized in Shueisha's Ribon magazine in 1962. The story is about a girl who can transform her appearance as she pleases by use of a magic mirror. The manga was a huge hit and was adapted into an anime, which then became the source of the ‘witch’ genre of anime portraying girls who were shapeshifters.
In the background is an atemporal cityscape reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). And in the center, towering in the middle, there is an oddly shaped figure. An undecipherable amalgam of Cubism, Surrealism, Neo-Dada, Pop, origami, and who knows what else.
In a noisy world where fighter jets fly overhead, firing machine guns in rapid succession, the characters stare at us, and we stare back.
Tanaami was born in Tokyo in 1936, graduated from Musashino Art University, and awarded a special prize by the Japan Advertising Artists Club in 1958. Having immersed in American counterculture and pop art since the 1960s, he was an independent artist who had been actively crossing boundaries to pursue his creative endeavors, which range from animation to silk screens, manga-like illustrations, collages, experimental films, paintings, three-dimensional works, and more, without restricting himself to any medium or genre. Inspired by his encounter with Andy Warhol, he had continued to experimentally challenge the major themes tackled by contemporary art today, such as art and design, art and products, everyday beauty, and the public and art, while using the design methodology of editing to the present day. Through more than half a century of creative activities, he has gained a high reputation worldwide as one of the pioneers of pop art, which symbolizes postwar Japan. Tanaami's recent major exhibitions include Keiichi Tanaami: Adventures in Memory (2024, The National Art Center Tokyo, Tokyo), TANAAMI!! AKATSUKA!! That’ s All Right!!(2023, PARCO MUSEUM TOKYO, Tokyo)the solo exhibitions Manhattan Universe (2022, Venus Over Manhattan, New York), A Mirror of the World (2022, Nanzuka, Tokyo), Tokyo Pop Underground (2019, Jeffrey Deitch, New York), and Keiichi Tanaami (2019, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland); as well as the group exhibitions Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), The World Goes Pop (2015, Tate Modern, London), International Pop (2015, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA), and many others. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Art Institute of Chicago, M+ (Hong Kong), National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), and Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art (Berlin).
グラビア プリント
It all happened after the Second World War. During Japan's period of rapid economic growth, countless images were printed using gravure printing. People were fascinated by the vivid colors. The term "gravure idol" is derived from gravure printing.
Times have changed. Gravure printing presses were huge and unsuitable for small print runs. At the end of 2021, Shueisha's gravure printing era came to a close.
Printing methods such as lithography, while abandoned as a commercial printing method, found their way into fine art printing, and have survived. However, given the scale and structure of gravure printing, it is extremely difficult to get it up and running again once it has stopped.
Since this was the final opportunity, Shueisha Manga Art Heritage decided to produce art prints using gravure printing presses. The purpose of this project is to pass on the gravure prints and the record of their production to future generations.
We then reached out to Keiichi Tanaami about this project.
Tanaami was born in 1936. After experiencing the Second World War as a child, Tanaami became active as a designer and illustrator after the war and was also the first art director of the Japanese edition of PLAYBOY (1975-2008, Shueisha).
"I'd love to do it," Tanaami responded.
At our first meeting, he said, “How about a collaboration with Akatsuka-san?” Within two months of the initial request, Tanaami had produced more than 20 works. At the end of 2021, six of these works were selected for gravure printing.
The length of the printing machine is about 60 meters. The height is around 15 to 20 meters. This is equivalent to around three train cars on the Yamanote Line, assuming each car is approximately 20 meters in length. The height is equivalent to a five or six-story building. The machine is much larger than a typical house. Within the machine, paper measuring 120 to 130 meters is fed through as it moves vertically.
Cylindrical plates with copper plating are used for printing. They are 1,900 mm long, with a diameter of roughly 800 to 880 mm, and a weight of 1.5 to 2.0 tons. To perform color printing, four plates are required: C (cyan = light blue), M (magenta = pink), Y (yellow), and K (key plate = black). At the method’s peak, more than 600 printing plates were in operation at the Kawaguchi plant of Toppan Printing (now TOPPAN Colorer Inc.) alone.
In the past, film was used to create plates through chemical etching, but from the 1990s onward, it became standard to cut plates directly from data using diamond needles. The same technique was used for these works.
Typically, four to six diamond needles are placed per plate, and they simultaneously carve images on the plate while the cylinders are rotated. In magazine printing, where multiple pages are laid out on a single sheet of paper, this does not cause any problems. However, in this case, since we needed to print single large-format works on one sheet, thin lines were found to appear at the seams. For this reason, we only used one diamond needle, and an engraving process that would take around one and a half hours when printing magazines took about five hours for the work to be completed. This is an unprecedented work of plate-making. Once the image is engraved onto the plate, it is given a chrome coating, increasing its hardness from roughly 200 to around 1,000. These plates last long enough to print a million copies.
For printing, liquid ink designed for gravure printing is used. A lightweight cup called the Zahn Cup is used to check the concentration. A hole 3 mm in diameter is drilled in the bottom. It measures how many seconds it takes for each color of liquid to drain completely, and this is used as the basis for adjusting the concentration. The draining times are 11.13 seconds for Y (yellow), 11.31 seconds for M (magenta = pink), 11.44 seconds for C (cyan = light blue), and 11.56 seconds for K (key plate = black). To adjust the color, the staff in charge of each color uses a stopwatch to adjust the time. This job requires skill.
An alarm sounds in the factory, and printing begins.
The printing speed is typically about 600 revolutions per hour. The paper flows at a speed equivalent to an Olympic athlete running the 100-meter dash. In offset printing, colors are printed in order from dark to light (K (black) → C (cyan) → M (magenta) → Y (yellow)), while in gravure printing, colors are printed in order from light to dark (Y→M→C→K). (Note: The order varies depending on the printing company.)
For these art prints created on a gravure printing press, we attempted something for the first time since the postwar era, apart from engraving with a single diamond needle.
The gravure printing press is so large, and the plate production so time-consuming, that test printing could not be carried out on the actual machine. An offset printing machine was used for the proofs, and gravure printing was carried out in accordance with the offset printing colors approved by the client. Although gravure printing is actually capable of richer color expression than offset printing, its capabilities have been intentionally limited for many decades.
These limitations were removed in the final days of published gravure.
Plate making and printing are carried out in the Adobe RGB color range, which exceeds the range of offset printing. This makes it possible to print in vibrant and deep colors.
In November 2021, Keiichi Tanaami observed the gravure printing process in action and, upon viewing the proof prints, called the results astonishing.
