Striking and Surreal: The Modern Art of Tetsuya Ishida

January 2020

Recent exhibitions in Madrid, Chicago and Taiwan demonstrate the popularity and impact of Japanese modern artist Tetsuya Ishida. Before his untimely passing in 2005, Ishida employed darkly powerful imagery and bleak humor to explore contemporary alienation in Japanese society.

Ishida’s paintings combine fantasy and hyper-realistic detail to surreal effect. The artist’s themes include workplace and academic pressures, the search for identity, and social dislocation. He drew inspiration from Japanese comics, as well as from the colorful magazine covers of painter-illustrator Rokurō Taniuchi, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, and literary works by Dostoyevsky, Kōbō Abe and Osamu Dazai. Ishida's images often combine human subjects with industrial imagery, and reflect the feelings of melancholy, isolation and anxiety experienced by young professionals living in corporatized economic circumstances.

Ishida grew up in a coastal town in Shizuoka Prefecture and attended Musashino Art University. After co-founding a graphic-design studio, he began to paint full-time, and eventually won the prestigious VOCA (Vision of Contemporary Art) Exhibition award and the Kirin Contemporary Art Award. Ishida died in a train accident in 2005, at the age of 31. An art book published after his passing attracted attention to his work, which had not been widely known before. In 2009, his family received the purple Japanese Medal of Honor in recognition of Ishida's artistic accomplishments.

The Asian Art Museum presented the first US exhibition of Ishida’s work in 2014. His work also appeared at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and at exhibitions in Hong Kong and throughout Japan. In 2019, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía organized a retrospective exhibition that featured 70 of Ishida’s paintings and drawings. This exhibition attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and later traveled to Wrightwood 659, a new gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood (designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando). Ishida’s work was also recently featured in the Taiwan art fair Taipei Dangdai.

Learn more about Ishida via Asahi Shimbun, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail.