Tiger Tateishi Exhibition – Track, Travel, Trap, Trance

Koichi Tateishi/Koto Tiger Tateishi/Koto Tateishi Tiger (1941-98), was an artist who gave birth to a unique world as he blended genres such as painting, ceramic carving, manga, picture books, and illustrations.

Tiger Tateishi was born in 1941 in the town of Ida in Chikuho, Kyushu (current day Tagawa City, Fukuoka Prefecture), and later moved to Tokyo to attend university.
In 1963, he made his debut at the ‘Yomiuri Independents’ exhibition, establishing the ‘Tourism Arts Research Institute’ with Hiroshi Nakamura (1932-) the following year.
His works, which referenced a wide variety of characters and images symbolic of the times and society, garnered attention as a forerunner of Japanese pop art.
65 years later, he began to draw manga, going on to write a series of nonsense manga for magazines and newspapers under the pen name ‘Tiger Tateishi’.
A word which many children began to say (“nyarome”), from around the end of the 1960’s, was actually a word made up by Tateishi, who was in contact with Fujio Akatsuka (1935-2008).
However, in March 1969, when Tateishi became very busy as a manga artist, he suddenly moved to Milan. Over his 13-year residency in Milan, while actively working on panel paintings which took their cues from manga, Tateishi also collaborated with designers and architects on numerous illustrations, designs, and advertisements.
In 1982, after becoming busy with illustration projects, Tateishi changed his environment once again and returned to Japan. From 1985 he was based in Ichihara, Chiba, Japan, and from 1990 onwards he exhibited paintings and ceramic sculptures under the name “Tateishi Taiga (Japanese: 立石大河亞)”, in addition to manga and picture books under the name “Tiger Tateishi (Japanese: タイガー立石)”.
Regardless of the time period, various events and ideas are piled up like a stratum within Tateishi’s works.
As such, it seems that not only the world created by the author, but also the circuit of our thoughts themselves is expanded in multiple dimensions by means of not only “seeing”, but also “seeing”.
Tateishi passed away in April 1998 at the young age of 56. This year, on the 80th anniversary of his birth, this exhibition looks back on his diverse activities through approximately 200 works and documents.
Following the “footprints” (tracks) of Tateishi , who used “Tiger” as his pen name, we will approach the charm of Tateishi’s art, including “sightseeing” (travel), “devices” (traps), and “transformation” (trans).