Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Japan has offered us its sushi, its mangas, its video game consoles and its reliable cars, but it has also given us Tetsuya Ishida, this painter who fell under a train at the age of 31 after painting our collective disaster with a surgical precision that would make a robot cry. While Takashi Murakami was flooding the market with his smiling flowers and Yayoi Kusama was hypnotizing us with her dots, Ishida was painting the raw truth of our modern existence, this gilded prison that turns us all into commodities. His work, largely unrecognized during his lifetime, resonates today with an intensity that makes us shiver as it seems to have anticipated our present.
Ishida was born in 1973 in a Japan that thought it had understood everything with its economic miracle. What a joke! The child prodigy of Yaizu developed while his country sank into what is now called the “lost decade”. Graduated from Musashino Art University in 1996, he immediately started painting these disturbing paintings that seem to come from the feverish brain of Kafka if he had been a Japanese office worker. Between 1996 and 2005, with remarkable consistency, he created nearly 200 works that document the progressive dehumanization of our world with a lucidity that hurts.
In “Recalled” (1998), Ishida presents us with a man packaged like a defective product, returned to the manufacturer in a box lined with protective foam. A technician, gloves on his hands, examines the “defective” product while the deceased’s family bows respectfully. This is our human condition reduced to its simplest economic expression! We are products, manufactured, conditioned, sold and, when we stop working, returned to the sender without even a refund. This visual metaphor is terrifyingly effective, we see all the genius of Ishida, his ability to condense a complex philosophical discourse into a single image that strikes the mind like a hammer.
If you are not already uncomfortable in your vegan leather armchair, look at “Cargo” (1997), where office employees are literally transformed into packages, tied up like roasts, with convenient handles for easy transport. They are stacked like bricks in the metro, ready to be delivered to their destination. Put that next to your Warhol and ask yourself which of the two artists really understood late capitalism! Where Warhol celebrated the aesthetics of repetition and consumption, Ishida reveals the human cost, the suffering hidden behind the smooth facades of offices and shopping malls.
Here, we must take a detour through the philosophy of work of Byung-Chul Han, this South Korean thinker who dissects our society of fatigue with an acerbic elegance that even the French envy [1]. In his work “The Society of Fatigue”, Han demonstrates how our neoliberal regime has transformed us into entrepreneurs of ourselves, internationalizing exploitation to the point where we have become both master and slave. “The contemporary subject of performance exploits himself, which means that he is both the bourgeois and the proletarian of himself,” he writes. Ishida had understood this well before Han theorized it. His “office employees” are not oppressed by a visible tyrannical boss, they have become the machines that oppress them.
In “Exercise Equipment” (1997), man literally becomes a treadmill, doomed to make other men identical to him run. Self-exploitation has never been illustrated with such visual clarity. Han writes: “The neoliberal subject of performance, who believes himself to be free, is in reality a slave. He is an absolute slave insofar as it is voluntarily that he exploits himself, without a master”. Isn’t this exactly what Ishida shows us? This vision is all the more relevant today, in the era of social networks where everyone becomes their own promoter, their own product, their own exploiter and their own exploited.
The philosophy of work of Han resonates perfectly with Ishida’s work. Both understand that violence no longer comes from the outside, it has become immanent to the system itself. Ishida’s paintings are inhabited by this invisible but omnipresent violence, this pressure that transforms humans into material, into resources, into capital. “The neoliberal regime transforms exploitation by others into self-exploitation,” writes Han, and Ishida precisely illustrates this process of internalizing oppression, this insidious transformation that makes us the guardians of our own prison.
But Ishida’s work is not limited to social critique. It is also deeply rooted in literature, and more particularly in the universe of Franz Kafka, this other prophet of modern alienation. When in “Long Distance” (1999), Ishida paints a man-insect squatting in front of a telephone, it is impossible not to think of Gregor Samsa waking up transformed into a “monstrous insect” [2]. The Japanese artist reproduces this Kafkaesque metamorphosis in almost all his works, merging humans with the objects that define their social function. This metamorphosis is not a simple visual analogy, it expresses the deep truth of our contemporary condition, where human identity dissolves into the functions imposed by the productive system.
As Kafka writes in “The Metamorphosis”: “It was not a dream”. This sentence could serve as an epigraph to Ishida’s entire work. His surrealist nightmares are not fantasies, they are the raw reality, stripped of the illusions we cultivate to bear our condition. Ishida, like Kafka before him, understood that the absurd is not a distortion of reality, but its revelation. Ishida’s surrealism is not an escape into the imaginary, but a tool to grasp the real beyond the deceptive appearances of the daily.
In “Prisoner” (1999), a giant schoolboy is pinned to the ground by the very architecture of his school, like Gulliver by the Lilliputians. The other students, identical and interchangeable, go about their business around him, indifferent to his ordeal. Isn’t this a perfect illustration of what Kafka calls “the apparatus” in “In the Penal Colony”, this machine that inscribes the sentence in the very flesh of the condemned? The school, an institution supposed to liberate through knowledge, becomes in Ishida a device of enslavement, a machine for formatting individuals so that they fit perfectly into the system. The gigantic student, immobilized by the building itself, symbolizes the impossible revolt, the individuality crushed by the weight of social conventions.
Kafkaesque literature and Ishida’s art share this ability to transform existential anguish into concrete images. In “The Trial”, K. is arrested without knowing the charge against him; in Ishida’s paintings, modern man is condemned without trial to become the raw material of a system he does not understand. This alliance between the concrete and the abstract, between the banal and the monstrous, creates an effect of defamiliarization that reveals the hidden truth behind our daily routines. In this sense, Ishida is a realist more than a surrealist, he shows what we refuse to see.
But where Kafka remains in the realm of text, Ishida forces us to see what we would prefer to ignore. His colors are dull, yes, but with a photographic precision that makes the horror of his visions even more unbearable. The faces of his characters, always the same face, in reality, often his own, express a resignation that makes me want to take a hammer and smash all the coffee machines in the offices of the city. This technical precision is not gratuitous, it serves to create an illusion of normality that makes the surrealist distortion even more shocking, as if the artist were telling us: “Look closely, this is your world, not mine”.
How can one remain indifferent to “Refuel Meal” (1996), where employees receive their food via gasoline pistols inserted into their mouths? This cannibalistic scene of capitalism reminds me of Kafka’s words: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”. Ishida’s paintings are precisely this axe, striking our numbed conscience until it bleeds. The violence of this image is not gratuitous, it reflects the systemic violence that we have come to accept as normal, the violence that makes us machines for consuming and producing.
If you think I am exaggerating, it is because you have never looked at “Untitled” (2001), where a man squatting on a vending machine wipes his butt with banknotes. This work should be projected on the facades of all the business schools in the world, just to see the face of the future Masters of the Universe when they realize what they are about to become. Ishida spares no one, neither the victims nor the accomplices of the system. His gaze is pitiless, but never cynical. There is always, behind the horror he depicts, a form of compassion, a silent call to resistance.
Ishida’s work is all the more powerful because it is prophetic. In “Conquered” (2004), a cell phone literally embeds itself in the face of a teenager, foreshadowing our current dependence on smartphones. Ishida painted our present before it happened, with a lucidity that is chilling. As Kafka wrote: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world”. Ishida chose to second the world by showing it as it is, without compromise. He did not propose solutions, did not preach for a better world, he simply bore witness, with a radical honesty that borders on despair.
The “lost decade” of Japan was only a foretaste of our own loss. While the Japanese hikikomori, these social recluses who no longer leave their rooms, foreshadowed our own digital isolation, Ishida documented this transformation with the precision of an entomologist studying a new species of social insect. In “Hothouse” (2003), an anthropomorphic radiator holds a sleeping boy in its arms, in a room strewn with empty bottles and cigarette butts. This disturbing scene of intimacy perfectly illustrates what human affection becomes in a world where the other is absent, we end up bonding with objects, for lack of anything better.
The recent exhibition at Gagosian “My Anxious Self” presented Ishida’s work to New York, revealing to the American public what the Japanese already knew: Ishida was not simply an artist of his time, but a visionary whose work becomes more relevant with each passing day. American critics, accustomed to the mandatory optimism of their culture, seemed surprised by the intensity of the despair expressed in these works. But this despair is not nihilism, it is a form of lucidity, a way of refusing easy consolations to confront the truth of our condition.
In “Offspring” (1999), Ishida paints himself emerging from the belly of a crocodile, a monstrous birth that evokes the anxieties of an entire generation confronted with an uncertain future. This work explores the question of heritage: what have we received from our predecessors, if not a broken world that we must inhabit despite everything? The four panels of this monumental work tell a story that is both personal and collective, that of a generation born into a world already corrupted, already dehumanized, and which must nevertheless try to live in it.
Kafka wrote: “A book must be an ice-pick that wounds the hand of the one who looks at it”. Ishida’s paintings are mirrors that reflect our own image, deformed not by the artist, but by the system that deforms us. The wound they inflict is proportional to our level of denial. The more we believe ourselves to be free, the more Ishida’s vision seems nightmarish to us, and the more it is necessary. It is precisely when art disturbs us that it fulfills its highest mission: to awaken us from our consenting slumber.
When Ishida died in 2005, run over by a train in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan lost its most lucid witness, and the art world lost a genius whose importance we are only beginning to measure. Was it suicide? The question remains open. But anyone who has spent time with his works understands that living with such lucidity is in itself a form of torture. How to continue navigating a world whose illusions have been exposed? How to participate in a system that we understand dehumanizes us? These unanswered questions haunt Ishida’s work as they haunted his life.
In 2009, Japan posthumously awarded him the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, a late recognition for an artist who never sought honors. His paintings are now sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the ultimate irony for someone who denounced the commodification of everything. “Untitled” (2001) was sold for 375,885 dollars at Christie’s in 2008, only three years after his death. The market, this great grinding machine that Ishida so brilliantly depicted, ended up absorbing him as well, turning his critique into a commodity.
Museums around the world are finally starting to take his work seriously. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid dedicated a retrospective to him in 2019, testifying to the universality of his vision. For if Ishida is profoundly Japanese, in his cultural references, in his attention to the specificities of Nippon society, his message transcends cultural borders. The alienation he depicts is not uniquely Japanese, it is the very condition of contemporary man, wherever he lives.
Looking at Ishida’s work, I cannot help but think that contemporary art has too often been content to become a diversion for the rich, an innocuous spectacle that disturbs no one. We have had too much Jeff Koons and not enough Ishida, too many artists who celebrate the system and not enough who question it. In a world where art has become just another investment, a line on a diversified portfolio, Ishida never stopped disturbing, confronting us with what we prefer to ignore.
So the next time you feel crushed by your work, think of Ishida’s paintings. And if you find them too dark, too depressing, ask yourself if it is not rather your optimism that is suspect. As Kafka wrote: “There is hope, but not for us”. Ishida would probably agree. And that is precisely why his art is so necessary: it prevents us from lying to ourselves. In a world saturated with pretenses, distractions and comfortable lies, Ishida’s raw truth acts as an antidote, bitter but saving.
- Han, Byung-Chul. “The Society of Fatigue”, Éditions Circé, 2014.
- Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis”, Éditions Gallimard, translated by Claude David, 1990.
