Portraits of others. At first, it was a self-portrait. I tried to make myself—my weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self—into a joke or something funny that could be laughed at. Becoming the object of laughter or becoming even sadder. It was sometimes seen as a parody or satire referring to contemporary people. As I continued to think about this, I expanded it to include consumers, city-dwellers, workers, and the Japanese people. The figures in the picture expanded toward people that I can feel.

—Tetsuya Ishida, 1999

Tetsuya Ishida is somewhat of a timeless anomaly in the global context of contemporary Japanese art. His dark and deadpan portrayals of the deep psyche of socially withdrawn figures in Japan resonate within the current realities of isolation that we have all experienced over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Untitled (2001), a boy wearing headphones sits on a bed-turned-graveyard, staring into a black family tombstone as if it is a TV screen (signaled by the remote control). A pair of white sneakers and the left hand and feet of a corpse stick out from under the graveyard’s concrete foundation. Outside the large windows, a long empty train passes by as if floating on water, perhaps a passage toward the afterlife. While Ishida’s premature death in 2005 prevented him from experiencing the pandemic, the subject of solitude and confronting our mortality within the confines of one’s personal space is particularly prescient. Ishida’s paintings exhibit a skillful use of the Surrealist uncanny tinged with a profound nihilism, in which he has reinvented the historical genealogy of realism in Japanese painting within the current moment.

In 1953, the Japanese art critic Ichirō Haryū revealed his concern over the ethics of artistic representation, proposing a fundamental reconception of realism to reconcile the psychosocial aspect of war: “Painting’s return to existence today is necessitated by the whole course of modern painting. However, a new Realism must come after a long agonizing process, during which all the contradictions of the inner world are brought to light and endured, without the revival of a naïve naturalism that will lead to an uncritical subjugation to the external world.”¹ The climate of international artistic exchange collided with the heightened cultural and political American influence within Japan during the 1950s, which required artists to rethink the entirety of their practice beyond the tropes of the objectivity of reportage painting that documented the urban wasteland of Japan in the aftermath of defeat as well as the detritus produced by the rise of mass capitalism and the country’s economic recovery in the decade following World War II.

Working nearly fifty years later, Ishida inherited and reworked this discursive dilemma of the “real,” especially through the legacies of New Objectivity and Surrealist strategies of duality and chance as a means to create a “violent assault on the complacency of mundane consciousness.”² Formally, Ishida’s recurring portraits are of the same listless man lost in thought, fusing with industrial machines, nestled within Kafkaesque insects and shells, or caught in the conveyer belt of a cold, posthumanist labor economy. The artist focuses on the submissive psyche of the salaryman (Japanese businessman) in works such as Cargo (1997), where bodies are conformed into boxed packages, literalizing the feeling of the daily rush-hour commuter trains where salarymen are squashed together like sardines. In Conveyer-Belt People (1996), several carbon-copy salarymen with eyes closed lie on the steps of an escalator, being cut open alive, like meat, by factory workers. As anthropologist Sawa Kurotani states, “In a drab, dark suit and tie, . . . the sarariiman [salaryman] is the embodiment of this ideal subjecthood in post-war Japan, apolitical and docile male subjects, whose masculinity is constructed through identification with, and dedication to, his corporate collective. Destroying the docile body can perhaps be read as a form of symbolic protest against the post-war hegemony of sarariiman-hood that, in the end, run them to the ground.”³ For Ishida, the salaryman is a symptom of loss through self-sacrifice, and his painstaking fusion of machine-bodies—as in Speed Faith (1996), where heads emerge out of car tires marked with rubber shoeprints—index their drained, cyclical labor, demonstrating Ishida’s satirical assault against the numbing “complacency of mundane consciousness.”

Ishida’s practice emerged during the height of the 1990s economic recession, after the death of Showa Emperor in 1989, and out of an economic condition that the philosopher Akira Asada termed “infantile capitalism,” referring to the cultural proclivity for alienated, escapist behavior that contributed to the formation of an alternate self that constantly consumes or is consumed by others. People were “cleverly maneuvered into displaying a childlike passion whereby they are easily obsessed with machines. Further, in such a postindustrial area as advertising, people become carried away by word play, parody, and all the other childlike games of differentiation.”⁴ Untitled (1) and Untitled (2) (both 1998) epitomize the psychological effects of this condition, in which the retreat into the second life of online worlds, alongside a barrage of floating billboards, ads, and magazines, resulted in a total mise-en-scène of reality, moving farther away from any symbolic referent.

This condition of increased alienation became a target for the Aum Shinrikyō cult, led by Shoko Asahara, who carried out a series of bioterrorism attacks that culminated in a coordinated sarin gas attack in several Tokyo subway lines in March 1995. Asahara’s straggly head emerges from a snail shell at the foot of a doorway in The Visitor (1999), as if to announce the coming of Armageddon. This was the same year as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, when hundreds of thousands were displaced from the Kobe region. Translucent images of boats, recalling those that helped the stranded in Kobe, appear as a ghostly backdrop in Conquered (2004), which features a bloody face smashed by a cell phone. The macabre image recalls the gruesome series of child murders committed by a fourteen-year-old in Kobe in 1997. It was during this time that Ishida wrote:

My fear of the society I will be entering: I will get used to it by transforming myself, but I can’t.

I feel myself living in the desires of others. I adapt to this by transforming myself, but I find it unbearable, agonizing.

It is virtually impossible to choose a technique or an environment. One can adapt if one transforms oneself. If one refuses to do so, one suffers from anxiety and uneasiness, which one mingles with gags, self-mockery, and grumbling.⁵

Here, Ishida internalizes the fear of the condition of “living an endless routine and the madness of absolute degree zero,”⁶ which had led to the erasure of the self and the subsequent rise of the sublime Aum cult. These events would generate a major sociological reevaluation of Japan’s cultural psyche, especially among its young people. Many of Ishida’s later works feature youths, perhaps most evocatively in Untitled (2003), where a boy stands in the middle of a yellow-green field, his body sliced in fragments like a wooden doll, and his right arm fallen on the grass like the toy hammer on his other side. Here, there is no hierarchy between human, objects, and the natural landscape. This interconnection is also poignantly portrayed in Untitled (2004), in which a young man turns his head to look up from his laptop. Tree branches that double as wired networks trickle down his spine like live tentacular insects. A disembodied finger, in place of a mouse wired to his laptop, points to a small flight of stairs that lead down into an abyss from the white table, offering escape. A white outline of a mini dharma-like cell phone appears in the center of the empty laptop screen as if an avatar to the netherworld. The boy’s stare, like that of many of Ishida’s subjects, offers a temporality both momentary and infinite. Here, however, rather than the passive confinement that normally characterizes his oeuvre, the body’s fusion and rootedness with the earth offers a sense of euphoric grounding, a welcome antidote to the specter of nihilism.