In Japan, the 1990s are known as the “Lost Decade”. After years of prosperity and technological advancement, an economic bubble had burst, causing the economy to crash and sending the country into a period of severe stagnation. The Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida was in his late teens and early 20s, and his early works bear all the hallmarks of the era’s fatigue and disillusionment. In his paintings, salarymen sleep on benches during their lunch break, wrapped (or trapped) in bagworm cocoons. Workers are transformed into machinery, or entangled with supermarket conveyor belts. The acceleration of technology, mental health, and economic downturn is combined in surreal, industrial chimeras.

The Lost Decade, which set the context for his coming-of-age, is “inseparable” from Ishida’s imagery and themes, says Nick Simunovic, the senior director for Asia at Gagosian, which is currently exhibiting Tetsuya Ishida’s works in Paris. “Long-held assumptions about work, the family and social stability began to dissolve,” he explains. “Ishida belonged to a generation that faced growing economic insecurity, dim employment prospects and an increasing sense of isolation. His paintings capture the fraught psychological reality of that moment. The figures [...] often appear trapped within systems larger than themselves. They have lost any sense of personal agency and are acted upon rather than being in control of their circumstances.”

Ishida died aged 31 in 2005, in Tokyo; his paintings undeniably speak to a specific time and place, from the early 90s through the turn of the millennium. But today, it’s hard not to see them as an almost prophetic insight into contemporary crises as well. Across the globe, automation, economic precarity, alienation and isolation are concepts that we’re all too familiar with, and Ishida’s work gets to the heart of the very human effects we see playing out all around us. 

Simunovic agrees that there’s an “eerily prescient” aspect to the paintings. “Ishida should not only be seen as a documentarian of 90s Japan,” he says. “These haunting and unforgettable images capture something fundamental about contemporary human experience, and part of their profound power comes from our ability to recognise ourselves in them. In many ways, the paintings are even more urgent and relevant today.”

A 2023 exhibition of Ishida’s paintings at Gagosian in New York marked the most extensive presentation of his works outside Japan to that date, with the new show in Paris also aiming to highlight the contemporary relevance of his commentary on the Lost Decade. Even in Japan, though, Ishida was relatively unknown during his lifetime and felt a “distinct kinship” with outsider artists rather than following major movements. A key inspiration, for example, was the social realist painter Ben Shahn, whose portrayal of the Lucky Dragon Incident – which saw Japanese fishermen exposed to nuclear radiation from an atomic bomb test by the US military in 1954 – was exhibited in Yaizu, Ishida’s hometown, in the early 80s.

Comics, cinema, and conceptual art, including the work of On Kawara were also sources of inspiration for Ishida, despite the painter largely working in isolation. And then there’s his “favourite novelist”, Franz Kafka, whose images and ideas crop up time and again, from men becoming indistinguishable from bugs (as in 1994’s Pill Bug) to the more abstract, psychological transformations of humanity in a maze of bureaucracy and involution. 

Toward the end of the 90s – as Japan contended with the aftershocks of a devastating earthquake, terrorist attacks by a mysterious doomsday cult, and other violent outbursts – Ishida explored how modern forms of alienation persist even in death. In Recalled (1998), this takes a particularly uncanny turn, as a family in mourning attire looks on while a technician inspects a man’s detached limbs, head, and torso, packaged in a box for shipping electronics. It’s a bleak scene, but in fact “Recalled” raises a question that runs through Ishida’s decade-long career: is this what we’re all destined for, to live, work, and die like machines, only to be packed up and shipped off like a faulty charger, or is another future possible? Can we somehow find what’s been lost?

Tetsuya Ishida is on show at Gagosian in Paris until July 31.