What reads as an odd pairing at first reveals the nature of the relationship between the icon and the fan.

At eighty years old, Keiichi Tanaami is the grandfather of Japanese Pop Art and is well known for merging fine art and design in his drawings and animations. In his practice, (a younger) Oliver Payne extracts certain mechanisms and structures in video game culture as reference to broader ideas of society.

For this exhibition, Tanaami created a series of black and white drawings that were sent to Payne who thoughtfully and carefully added stickers from the popular Japanese “bullet hell” arcade games, addressing our assumptions about the way to navigate a picture.