Paintings of Tetsuya Ishida, late Japanese artist who was a prophet of urban alienation, get major showcase at Gagosian Gallery in New York

Everything kawaii art is not, Ishida‘s gloomy paintings that portray people as lonely cogs in the machine of Japan’s post-bubble economy were slow to catch on

His art is still relatively little known outside Japan, something Gagosian Gallery aims to put right with one of the biggest shows yet of his work, in New York

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“Refuel Meal” (1996) by Tetsuya Ishida is featured in “My Anxious Self”, a Gagosian Gallery exhibition in New York that is one of the biggest of works by the late surrealist artist outside Japan since his death in 2005 in an accident. Photo: courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Richard James Havis

Published: 6:15pm, 15 Oct 2023

Today the paintings of Tetsuya Ishida, who died in 2005, seem prescient, even prophetic.

A socially conscious Japanese artist whose pictures bend and morph the physical world, Ishida’s work depicts the urban alienation, loneliness and corporate dehumanisation of post-bubble-economy Japan against a backdrop of technological advances such as mobile phones and robotic production lines.

Ishida, who was 31 when he died after being hit by a train, was active only for around 10 years, but produced more than 200 pictures using acrylics on board, and later, oils.

His gloomy, sometimes desperate, work was out of step with the trend of Japanese art in the 1990s, when many artists adopted the kawaii (cute) aesthetics of Japan’s pop culture, and he felt he had more in common with the post-war generation of artists than contemporaries like Takashi Murakami, whose work he disliked.

Tetsuya Ishida. Photo: courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

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.