Consequently, his work was ignored until 2006 in his home country, when a television documentary brought him to the attention of the public and Japanese collectors.
But Ishida has remained relatively unknown outside Japan, a situation Gagosian Gallery – which now represents the artist worldwide – seeks to rectify with one of the biggest exhibitions of the artist’s work, called “My Anxious Self”, at its West 24th Street location in New York.
Ishida’s paintings – such as Gripe (1996), which depicts a ticket collector whose arms have changed into crab claws – can be described as surreal. But unlike classical surrealists, Ishida was more interested in social concerns than psychology, and his pictures, unlike many surrealist works, have no erotic charge.
He had a similarly ambiguous relationship with anime, says Cecilia Alemani, the show’s curator and artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale.
“Ishida drew on anime’s combination of the human body and the robot body, and he also takes the idea of metamorphosis from anime. But his work is not influenced by anime’s visual style,” she says.Ishida, who was born in 1973, was a big fan of classics of the anime genre such as Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and his works are filled with semi-robotic creatures like the ones seen in animated science fiction. But he did not paint in the flat, two-dimensional style of anime, and portrayed technology as repressive rather than liberating.
Many of Ishida’s early pictures depict workers becoming part of the machinery of the workplace which surrounds them, such as the store assistant in Supermarket (1996) whose arms have been turned into conveyor belts.
Blue-collar workers and white-collar “salarymen” are transformed in Ishida’s work into tools or into the goods they are making, Alemani says. “It stresses the deep existential anxiety and alienation of Japanese society.”
Recalled (1998), one of his best-known paintings, shows a man in a box cut into pieces, looking like a disassembled robot.
Recalled by his company because he is malfunctioning, he is being mourned by a family expressing no emotion, while the figure who could be the mother holds a small, unlit bulb in her hand, which Alemani thinks may represent his soul.
“It shows what Ishida thought about alienation, and also what he thought about the role of technology,” Alemani says. “As with many of his paintings, nobody looks at each other. In Ishida’s works, people never look at friends or family, they always look straight ahead, and the gazes never cross.”
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The educational establishments that provided fodder for the workforce did not escape Ishida’s critical gaze. Prisoner (1999) shows the giant head of a boy protruding from the side of a school building – his body is wholly trapped inside.
“The school building has become a straitjacket. He is portraying another form of constriction, as the school institutions were rigid and strict,” Alemani says.
“There is an interesting relation between a picture like this and the pictures of the salarymen working in factories on production lines. One thing leads to the next.”
Another important work is an untitled 1998 painting that depicts the hikikomori – the young, jobless people who never left their rooms during the economic downturn of the 1990s.
The paintings are often thought to be autobiographical, partly because the same young man has appeared in many of the paintings. But Alemani thinks otherwise.
In spite of his attachment to the themes of loneliness and alienation, Ishida himself was not a hikikomori. He was very much part of the world – he had friends and girlfriends, and he took jobs to support himself.
“He was shaken emotionally, but he wasn’t a recluse,” Alemani says.
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Similarly, although he was not part of the mainstream arts scene in Japan, Ishida was not an “outsider” artist with no official training. He studied at the Musashino Art University, where he learned to become a highly skilled artist.
“He liked outsider artists, but he wasn’t one himself,” says Alemani.
What sets Ishida apart from his contemporaries in Japan is his commitment to social art and to reflecting the distorted values in society.
This stems from an encounter with the work of American social-realist artist Ben Shahn when he was young.
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Shahn’s ideas, and his pictures of the Lucky Dragon incident – in which crew members of a Japanese fishing boat were contaminated with radioactive ash from a nuclear test by the United States on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in 1954 – deeply affected his view of the purpose of art.
But Ishida’s work should not simply be reduced to one element, Alemani says. The social effects of the bubble economy are paramount in his work, but he was also influenced by events such as the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and the sarin attacks carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on the Tokyo subway the same year.
“Ishida’s work is very complex,” she says. “It represents more than just the bubble economy – it looks at the overall culture of Japanese society.”
“Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self”, Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York. Until Oct. 21.
