Tetsuya Ishida

Ishida’s surrealist paintings reflect the melancholy of Japan’s Lost Generation (1991-2001) amidst economic decline in tandem with capitalist alienation. In his portraits, his self became a surrogate for Japan as a nation, “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. 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.” Figures merge with everyday appliances, industrial machinery, civic architecture, and animal forms, an absurd nod to the idea of people as machines or exploitable resources rather than autonomous beings.