The Asian Art Museum is offering a small exhibit of close to a dozen paintings by the young Tokyo artist Tetsuya Ishida...
...who was a probable suicide in 2005 when he was crushed by a moving train at age 32 (above is Untitled from 2001).
His paintings are surreal and disturbing (On Holiday, 1988)...
...creating a singular vision that's as individual and instantly recognizable as a Dali, Munch or Kahlo (Autonomy, 2004).
Most of the paintings feature a disembodied head, looking like a satirical self-portrait of the artist, along with other body parts morphing into inanimate objects. We are all just cogs in a machine has never been quite so persuasively illustrated (Contact, 1998).
I visited the exhibit with a pair of young Japanese gay men, and the 1999 Prisoner above struck one of them as a frighteningly realistic depiction of his middle school days, complete with the total despair brought on by required physical education classes.
2 comments:
That is terrible. The pressure on the individual...
I brought a friend of mine to see the exhibit as I was both intrigued and disturbed by it. My friend doesn't know much about art but she worked for the same huge medical/educational complex that I did and immediately recognized the institutional claustrophobia and oppression that we endured.
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