Tetsuya Ishida’s Haunting Vision of Japan’s Lost Generation Lands in Paris

Summary

• Tetsuya Ishida’s first-ever French exhibition opens at Gagosian Paris on June 10

• The Japanese painter’s nightmarish work captures the psychological toll of Japan’s 1990s economic collapse

Gagosian Paris opens its first exhibition dedicated to Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida on June 10. Although Ishida died in 2005 at the age of 32, his work has gained growing international recognition in recent years, resonating with audiences far beyond Japan.

Ishida came of age during Japan’s “lost decade,” the economic downturn that followed the collapse of the country’s asset bubble in the 1990s. But his paintings aren’t really about economics. They’re about the anxiety, isolation, and uncertainty that defined life for a generation entering adulthood as the promises of stability and upward mobility began to disappear.

Across his work, blank-faced office workers, students and young men find themselves trapped in strange, often unsettling situations. In “Sleeping Bagworm (1995),” a suited man lies on a bench sealed inside a cocoon-like sleeping bag that feels both protective and suffocating. Convenience Store Mother and Child (1996) shows a figure curled inside a shopping basket while a woman simultaneously cradles his head and scans him like a product at checkout. Elsewhere, the boundaries between people and machines completely break down. In “Supermarket (1996),” a man’s arms become conveyor belts. In “Recalled (1998),” a grieving family watches as a technician examines a man’s disassembled body, with his head and hands packed neatly inside a box.

Part of what makes Ishida’s work enduring is how difficult it is to categorize. His paintings draw from social realism, surrealism and Japanese visual culture, creating images that feel linked to their moment while remaining timeless in an unnerving way.

Gagosian Paris
4 Rue de Ponthieu, 75008
Paris, France