A Painter of Japan’s ‘Lost

Decade,’ Finally Found

Tetsuya Ishida’s prescient and terrifying
works arrive in New York.
Sept. 12, 2023

Tetsuya Ishida’s “Refuel Meal” (1996).© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy of the artist,
Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, and Gagosian

Observers of the world economy call the 1990s in Japan

the Lost Decade. Following what the Washington Post
would describe as “an orgy of easy credit and
speculation” at the end of the 1980s, residential land
values in urban areas became so inflated that, as a
former New York Times business editor would argue
years later, the “Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo was
believed to be worth as much as the entire state of
California.” When the bubble finally burst, in 1991,
unemployment and bankruptcies rose. Suicides
increased as well. As with many economic calamities,
adolescents and young adults were especially impacted,
having to support themselves on low wages that were
hard to come by. They became collectively known as the
“Employment Ice Age Generation.”

“Recalled” (1998).© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

It was during the Lost Decade that a Japanese

psychiatrist coined the term “hikikomori” to describe the
severe and prolonged social withdrawal that was
afflicting a small percentage of the population, who
refused to leave their bedrooms, even for work or school,
and had begun replacing face-to-face interaction with
communication via what were then the novel
advancements of personal computers, cellphones and
the World Wide Web. It was also during this time that the
Tokyo-based artist Tetsuya Ishida, who was born in 1973
and channeled his era’s isolation and anxiety into
nightmarish visions, began painting seriously. Between
1995 and 2005, while working intermittent jobs — in a
factory that made packaging for snacks, as a night
security guard — he made about 200 paintings. Ishida
died at age 31 after being struck by a train in a Tokyo
suburb. He achieved little recognition in his lifetime, and
his works have not been easily seen by Western
audiences. This week, Gagosian gallery on West 24th
Street in New York will open the most comprehensive
showing to date of the artist’s paintings in the States,
organized by the curator Cecilia Alemani.

“Conquered” (2004).© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Ishida’s works have aged remarkably well in the years

since his death, in part because his recurring themes
have become nearly universal conditions of life in the 21st
century: loneliness and alienation, which he described as
“inescapable”; the threat of rabid consumerism to
individual identity; addiction to technology and
automation; and, as Ishida put it in his notebooks, “my
weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self.” Take his
painting “Hothouse” from 2003. He addresses the
hikikomori phenomenon explicitly, though his subject is
more solitude generally. A boy is in his room, empty
bottles littering the floor. The ashtray is full of cigarettes.
An outlet is visible, crammed with chargers belonging to
electronic devices that are, tellingly, not depicted. The
boy has no company except for his radiator, rendered as
a human companion cradling him as they both sleep, the
peacefulness of their slumber only underscoring the
sense of an isolation so complete it has become routine.

Tetsuya Ishida, circa 1995.© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Ishida called the figures who populate his works “self-

portraits of other people.” (“I have strong empathy for
others’ pain, suffering, sorrow, anxiety and solitude,” he’d
write in another notebook entry.) He often painted young
men, in suits or other professional attire, with expressions
of vague concern as they engage intimately, grotesquely
with some usually mundane aspect of modernity. Grocery
stores are a recurring setting, a site of existential dread
and a platform for Ishida’s dry sense of humor. In 1996’s
“Supermarket,” a shopper at a checkout counter looks on
helplessly as his arms, which have transformed into
conveyor belts, deliver products to the register. In an
untitled painting from 1997, a man who has removed
several boxes of food from an overstuffed shelf in a snack
aisle places his own body among the packages on
display, as if overwhelmed by the options before him.

“Untitled” (1997).© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

In an introduction to a book published to coincide with

the show, Ishida’s older brother Michiaki recalls going
through Tetsuya’s wallet after his death, and discovering
several American one-dollar bills. “Perhaps it was his
wish to go to New York, the center of contemporary art,
one day,” he writes. At the very least, his works will
resonate with an American audience lurching
uncomfortably out of a pandemic that, for a time anyway,
left a lot of people more isolated than usual. Ishida has
often been described as a surrealist, and he is, but his
works also feel topical. It’s hard not to see a painting like
2004’s “Conquered” — which depicts a charging
cellphone, a news clip playing on its screen, violently
embedded in a human face — as some kind of warning
from 20 years in the past, a prophecy from an artist who,
either despite his anxiety or because of it, saw where the
world was headed with startling clarity.

“Hothouse” (2003).© Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists
shaping the city’s cultural landscape.

Works by the Iranian-born artist Nairy Baghramian

are on display at the Met and MoMA this fall. With
her art, she embraces the canon, only to take it
apart.

The sculptor Ruth Asawa helped erase boundaries

between art, craft and the decorative arts. A show of
drawings at the Whitney Museum explores her
luminous connections.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the

exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and
Transatlantic Modernism,” which will include a trove
of paintings from historically Black colleges and
universities around the country.

The Met recently acquired “Bélizaire and the Frey

 Children,” a 19th-century Louisiana portrait with a
secret: For over 100 years, the image of an enslaved
youth was erased. This is his story.

Featuring artwork, music, memorabilia and

recreations of touchstones from the career of the
rapper Jay-Z, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public
Library aims to bring aspirational celebrity
extravagance to a free public haven.

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery
shows not to miss in September.

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