A son of Japanese parents, Tajiri was born in Los Angeles on December 7 1923.

After his studies at the Art Institute in Chicago from 1947 to 1948, he left for Paris,

where he first studied with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine and later with the painter Ferdinand Léger.

After the war, Tajiri was one of the first artists who created 'Junk sculptures'.

With this, he earned the admiration of the Dutch artists Constant, Karel Appel and Corneille, who

resided in Paris. They invited him to take part in the large CoBrA-exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949.

In 1956 Tajiri took up residence in Amsterdam and in 1962 he moved, together with his wife Ferdi and

his two daughters to Castle Scheres in Baarlo near Venlo.

In the Netherlands, Tajiri was soon admired for his incredible diversity. As well as being a sculptor,

Tajiri was a professor at the Hochschüle für Bildende Künste in Berlin for some years and he was also

occupied with several experiments, For instance; he developed his own offset-press called the X-press

and he revived a few nearly forgotten photography methods in an unique way such as the

Daguerreotypes. Drawing on the computer became one of his later passions.