Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self
“Ishida’s work is tragicomic, shocking, and deeply personal.”
Exhibition catalogs are complex beasts. Most act as the centerpiece of a museum’s gift shop, touting the opportunity for the average visitor to some blockbuster show to be able to take home a bit of the visual magic. Those tomes often then rot on a coffee table for the next decade, a middle-class reminder that one enjoys cultural events, one appreciates art. As such, rarely is the written content in a catalog all that important or all that good. Typically, it is just a reproduction of some of the wall text accompanied by a three- to seven-page essay by a curator screaming into the wind.
This is not your typical exhibition catalog.
Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self was one of the most remarkable exhibitions of the fall season. The artist’s first exhibition in New York felt like a museum show rather than one held in a Chelsea gallery (albeit, one of the biggest and best of the big galleries, Gagosian). For just over a month, visitors had the opportunity to witness one of Japan’s most heartbreaking and humorous artists of the Lost Generation in all his staggering glory. To be there was akin to being slapped in the face by a fish, drinking a shot of vodka, and then watching your mom die—no one was prepared. Ishida’s work is tragicomic, shocking, and deeply personal.
Translating that into a book seems like an impossible task. The medium, compact by nature, can never capture the feeling one has experiencing one of Ishida’s paintings in person; however, while most will purchase this book for the plates—all of which are finely printed, if a bit small—the value comes from the essays.
Not merely a reproduction of the wall text, Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self introduces the artist to an American audience, setting the stage for how such haunting and ridiculous paintings could even be made. Gagosian himself writes about the links between Ishida and other canonical artists like Ben Shahn or George Grosz who saw the horrors of their respective generations and forced the viewer to face the most grotesque, brutal parts of humanity, often with a dash of humor.
Curator Cecilia Alemani’s thoughtfully researched approach unpacks the economic stagnation of Japan in the 1990s and its broader cultural implications. Known as the Lost Generation, Ishida and others his age entered a precarious workforce where people were treated like cogs. Social isolation, financial uncertainty, and the birth of the faceless, overworked salaryman defined the period. All of these emotions and figures populate Ishida’s canvases, with lost young men in suits having their arms replaced by conveyor belts or boys so lonely they climb into the shelves of the cereal aisle for a hug.
Alemani is particularly astute in her assessment of Ishida’s uncanny paintings featuring male figures calmly augmented with mechanized parts. Like some docile version of The Human Centipede, these bodies accept their fate with such resignation that it almost pushes the viewer to be complicit in their debasement. Alemani notes how these paintings are most likely a morbid response to the famed Osaka Expo of 1970, the first world’s fair ever held in Asia and one that promised so much prosperity to so many. That optimism was nowhere to be found for Ishida.
It is also impossible to talk about this book without touching on issues of mental health. Ishida died in 2005 at the age of 31 after being struck by a train. While not definitive, most have assumed this was an act of suicide, especially when images of self-mutilation and depression populate so many of his works. The paintings, however, were part of his coping—as Ishida is quoted as saying, “I try to make the situation bearable with gags, self-mockery, and irony.” Don’t we all?