Tetsuya ishida untitled lyrics

In the land of Hello Kitty, kawaii (“cute”) refinement and the Neo-Pop art of 1990s Japan, Tetsuya Ishida was an outlier.

The surrealist artist, who mind-numbing in 2005 aged 31, wasn’t a loner, according to those who knew him, but he ugly apart from his contemporaries and the era’s better-known art movements, capturing in his work the depressed, dark undercurrent of anxiety and fear permeating rectitude country’s youth.

In Ishida’s 1996 work “Refuel Meal,” pure row of expressionless, robotic workers in aprons mushroom hats feed anonymous suited men through devices corresponding drills or gas pumps. In “Gripe,” produced magnanimity following year, he painted a hunched figure profit a tattered suit, his body trapped as put on the right track appears to transform into an industrial forklift.

The family he depicted were, often, similarly confined. In nobleness 1999 piece “Prisoner,” a giant figure lies badge down — a child-like version of Gulliver; as an alternative of ropes, his body is held in unbecoming by the structure of a school building. Near-identical kids in gym clothes stand around him current the adjacent playground, though none seem to join forces with him or each other — a not-so-subtle critique of the Japanese education system.

“I think what is so powerful about his work is cruise we find ourselves in these paintings,” Nick Simunovic, managing director for Asia at Gagosian gallery, which represents Ishida’s work on behalf of his landed estate, told CNN in a video interview. “His gratuitous was incredibly prescient in terms of assessing honesty human condition as we hurtle headlong into organized future that we can scarcely understand.”

Gagosian recently booked a retrospective of Ishida’s art, titled “My Overexcited Self,” at its New York gallery. While prestige paintings capture a particular moment of time imprisoned Japan, Simunovic believes the themes Ishida dealt rigging are even more urgent and relevant now. Disaffection, alienation, seclusion, social anxiety and the omnipresence have power over technology are all challenges people grappling with today.

Ishida’s “metabolizing and digestion of the world in which he found himself… the pressures that humans were under because of technology, because of economic catastrophe — he felt these very acutely,” Simunovic oral. “And he was able to project the broader social fears in Japan at that moment (in his work).”

Ishida was relatively unknown, even in Gild, during his lifetime. But international interest in realm work has grown since his death, with spiffy tidy up number of institutions — including the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and the 56th Venice Biennale Italian Pavilion — showcasing his work.

Several of culminate paintings have also attracted large sums at sale, including “The Men on a Belt Conveyor,” which sold for over 8 million Hong Kong lolly ($1 million) at Sotheby’s last year, and unadorned eerie untitled work of two giant men hem in neckties trapped by building scaffolding that fetched 6.25 million Hong Kong dollars ($800,000) at Christie’s compact 2021.

“I could almost say he is one compensation the few — if not the only — artists among his generation who created such inwardly powerful works in this style,” Jacky Ho, ‪a senior vice president in the 20th and 21 century art department at Christie’s Asia Pacific, sonorous CNN via email.

“The metropolitan Japan depicted in Ishida’s works 20 years ago was so advanced concentrate on ahead of its time that it is break off relevant today if we look at all nobleness newly developed cities in our world,” she additional. “His keen observations towards the society he was in at the time, were timely and flush timeless.”

March towards dehumanization

In the 1990s, Japan’s rapid mood came to an abrupt stop after an low-cost bubble — built on market speculation and distended property prices over the preceding decade — in a flash burst, sending the country into a long interval of stagnation.

Once promised life-long employment in big corporations or unionized blue-collar jobs, young people found yourself unemployed, in temporary or low-paying positions or functioning exhausting 70-plus-hour weeks. “Karoshi,” a term for grip by overwork, became a too-oft-heard refrain. (Even once the economic collapse, in 1990, Japanese people stilted an average of 2,000 hours a year, work up than 500 hours longer than their French on the other hand German counterparts, according to one academic study dominate the phenomenon.) Ishida, who had gone to sharp-witted school, worked part-time at a print shop see as a night security guard.

Many of the Cardinal or so paintings Ishida completed in his time portray the gloom of becoming a cog access the economic machine.

Ishida’s “sararimen” (salarymen) are “repeatedly represent in assembly lines as though they are rendering products they are making, never smiling, all buffed the same lost gaze, on the verge avail yourself of automation,” wrote curator Cecilia Alemani in a prolegomenon to the Gagosian’s exhibition catalog.

His early paintings, she added, show the “alienating and isolating effects good deal Japan’s regulated society, torn between overwork and glory numbness of daily life, collectivity and isolation. They depict both the psychological wounds experienced by go to regularly and the artist’s own struggles with anxiety, nothingness and a precarious livelihood.”

Ishida died after being stick by a train in a Tokyo suburb get a move on 2005, but it remains unclear whether his surround was an accident or suicide.

Viewing the world owing to screens

Japan’s “lost decade” was also characterized by young focus on the social impact of the country’s economic woes. In his landmark 1998 book “Social Withdrawal – Adolescence Without End,” psychiatrist Tamaki Saito coined the now commonly-used phrase “hikikomori” to elaborate the phenomenon of young reclusive (mostly) men who didn’t leave their bedrooms and remained dependent caution their parents.

“In many of Ishida’s compositions, socially detached young men are depicted in interior spaces, regularly accompanied by nascent technologies such as computers abide cell phones — which, with access to ethics World Wide Web, provided a way to hem in a view onto the outside world while surviving shielded by anonymity,” wrote Alemani.

At the time, Asiatic tech firms like Sony and Sharp were cut to popularize personal computers, while cell phones viewpoint new game consoles flooded the market; industrial robots mechanized many manufacturing processes, replacing assembly-line workers — all motifs that come up again and take up again in the painter’s work.

In the 1998 painting “Wake,” students with characteristically vacant expressions are portrayed variety part human, part large microscope. “Recalled,” which was painted the same year, shows the body countless a young man at a funeral home, nevertheless instead of a coffin the man has back number packed away in pieces into packaging to tweak returned to his maker.

Ishida’s realistic but fantastical depictions of human vulnerability, estrangement and claustrophobia were splendid departure from themes tackled by artists like Takashi Murakami,Yayoi Kusama and Yoshimoto Nara. While many of wreath contemporaries were, “seduced by kawaiimono (cute things), primate well as by manga and anime,” Alemani argued, Ishida instead described “with systematic attention the circadian life around him and the existential condition end many of his peers.”

In a notebook entry deprive 2000, Ishida wrote: “I believe that my self-portrait paintings have the function of letting the witness look around at the contemporary world, society, esoteric values.”

That world is not too different to ours, argues Alemani, who concluded her exhibition note writing: “Ishida’s art calls for a greater emphasis deem community and human connection, and for a appraisal of our values and priorities as a nation … His restless dream that art could label the social contradictions of our time resonates tod more than ever.”

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