![]() ![]() When I try to express these feelings of anxiety, I think of the cold urban condition. To fit in, I must change myself, and if I refuse to, I am made to feel fear and loneliness and anxiety. The influence of this culture on Ishida is evident in the fantastic combinations he presents.Īs a method of psychological survival, Ishida integrated self-portraits (of his alter ego) and symbols of social repression, creating ridiculous convergences that relativize his situation and make it a “target of laughter.” The following note he left explains this process: “I, too, can’t really choose my environment. These join with human spirits, or the brain joins with a robotic exoskeleton, and each is enhanced. Behind this natural acceptance of amalgamation is the influence of animism, which acknowledges the existence of spirits in all nonhuman things, such as machines and animals. In Japan’s manga and anime culture, there are many characters that are amalgams of humans and machines, such as composite robots, or the masked Kamen Rider, who is a man melded with a grasshopper. These subjects’ convergences with different things appear forced, and it seems that the only way these men can survive their transformation is to accept it-to come to terms with others, and with the outside world. Ishida’s paintings started as self-portraits, and their subjects came to take on an iconic personality with which viewers can easily identify. The people in these works seem to be enduring the process of physical transformation amid the sweetness and bitterness of concealing themselves. The young men appear bewildered by the situation, yet they have the expressions of martyrs determined to accept their fate. One of the defining characteristics of Ishida’s oeuvre is the image of a surrealistic “convergence.” Young men, their faces strikingly similar from work to work, appear to merge with the various things that surround them, such as beds, airplanes, trucks, dressers, microscopes, and even animals. Here, I offer an analytical examination of the works’ character and how they reflect their time. During the ten short years of activity covered here, Ishida made some two hundred paintings and a plethora of sketches. The hikikomori shared a chaotic vision of the warping of the normal relationship between their interior worlds and the world outside-between self and society-which is reflected in Ishida’s works. The number of hikikomori (unemployed shut-ins unable to negotiate the outside world) who had lost the ability to communicate swelled. By the latter half of the ’90s, many young people were unable to find full-time jobs: they lost hope for their future and began to drop out of society, their retreat accelerated by an environment overloaded with media. The employment rate of new grads fell to 60 percent, and by 1998 the suicide rate exceeded thirty thousand annually. Born in 1973, Ishida (who died in 2005) spent his twenties in the period of recession known as “the lost decade” after the Japanese economic bubble burst in 1991. ![]() They teem with the dark, quiet, and subdued air of apathy and regression unique to comics, reflecting the state of mind of the Japanese youth of the artist ’s generation. One of the appeals of Tetsuya Ishida’s works is the accessibility of his images. ![]()
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