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TETSUYA ISHIDA (1973–2005) · JAPAN

Ishida — FUNCTIONAL, 1999

Tetsuya Ishida was born in 1973 in Yaizu, a fishing town in Shizuoka. He came of age during Japan's "lost decade," the long recession that followed the boom, and studied Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University. An early encounter with the Social Realist Ben Shahn set him toward social commentary; the flatness of manga and advertising stayed in his work for life.

Ishida — Convenience Store Mother and Child, 1996
Ishida — Untitled, 1995
Ishida — Earthquake, 2003
Ishida — Collection, 1998
Ishida — A man can't fly anymore, 1996
Ishida — Waiting for a Chance, 1999
Ishida — Prisoner, 1999
Ishida — Untitled, 2004

MY ANXIOUS SELF Line: September 12–October 21, 2023 · 555 West 24th Street, New York · Curated by Cecilia Alemani 

In 1993 he began to paint the pictures that would define him: young men and schoolboys with the same blank face, fused into conveyor belts, desks, microscopes and buildings — the human being processed into a component. "At first, it was a self-portrait," he said. "My weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self… As I continued, I expanded it to include consumers, city-dwellers, workers, the Japanese people."

Ishida — Refuel Meal, 1996
Ishida — The Sleeping Bag Worm, 1995

TETSUYA ISHIDA Line: June 10–July 31, 2026 · rue de Ponthieu, Paris 

The first exhibition dedicated to Ishida in France. His protagonists — blank-faced, anonymous, recalling Magritte's bowler-hatted men — face dreamlike situations and undergo mechanical and animal metamorphoses. Drawing on Social Realism, Surrealism and Japanese popular culture, the paintings become powerful symbols of the loss of individual agency in a society organised around work, consumption and technology.

Around 2000 he moved from acrylic to oil; the dread grew quieter and stranger. He was building an international reputation — his paintings had already appeared at Christie's in 1998, beside those of a young Takashi Murakami — when he died in 2005, aged thirty-one, with fewer than two hundred paintings finished.

Ishida — Under the Company President's Umbrella, 1996
Ishida — Recalled, 1998
Ishida — Gripe, 1997
Ishida — Carp Dream, 1996
Ishida — Getting Up, 1999
Ishida — Untitled, 1998 (canvas)
Ishida — Prisoner, 1999 (hi-res)

Two decades after his death, the world has caught up to Tetsuya Ishida. What once read as one young man's private anxiety now looks like a prophecy of our own exhausted, over-connected age — which is exactly why, in London, New York and now Paris, people are finally standing in front of these paintings and recognising themselves.

Ishida — Marketplace, 1999
Ishida — Gripe, 1996

All works © Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Images courtesy Gagosian. Exhibition texts adapted from Gagosian. For editorial feature by Boys Hostel.

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