[3] Takai also made illustrations for Yasunari Kawabata's Lyric Poem (Jojōka) and other literary works.
[1] In 1930, Takai joined the Bauhaus-inspired artist group New Form Studio (Shin zōkei kōbō 新造型工房), founded by Seiji Tōgō and Kigen Nakagawa.
In 1938, he co-founded the Ninth Room Society (Kyū-shitsu kai 九室会) with Yuki Katsura, Yoshishige Saitō, Takeo Yamaguchi, Jirō Yoshihara, among others.
[3] From around 1940, wartime controls were imposed and repression of avant-garde art intensified, and in 1941 the Surrealists Ichirō Fukuzawa and Shuzō Takiguchi were arrested.
Takai was awarded the Nika Special Prize in 1940 for Returning People (Kaeru hitobito) and Town of Emigrant (Emiguranto no machi).
During this period, Takai produced many figurative paintings in bright, vivid colours, marking his dramatic rebirth after the suppression of creativity under the wartime regime.
In July of the following year, Takai moved to New York where he had another solo exhibition at the Collector's Gallery in June 1956.
From then on, Takai exhibited regularly at the Poindexter Gallery and established himself as an Abstract Expressionist artist in the New York art world.
The Poindexter Gallery represented major Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, among others.
Takai's 61–4 (1961) and in Aka (1963) were acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. From around 1963, in a dramatic change from his previous Abstract Expressionist paintings, Takai began to paint semi-figurative motifs such as fish, birds, butterflies, plants, the sun, shellfish, horses and people.