Tetsuya Ishida's ‘Can't Fly Anymore,’ a seminal painting created at the dawn of the artist's career, will soon head to auction at #SothebysHongKong. It’s among the earliest examples of Ishida's mature visual language and comments on the social anxieties of postwar Japan. The painting was created in 1996 against the backdrop of Japan’s “lost decade.” In 1991, Japan’s market crashed, causing graduate employment to collapse to 60%. In this context, Ishida created his ‘everyman’ character, widely interpreted as a self-portrait, to represent the modern Japanese worker. Here, Ishida depicts the man as he attempts in vain to swim through the sky. This image satirizes productivity within a society that has ceased to function, mirroring Japan’s economic stagnation and social dysfunction of the time. ‘Can’t Fly Anymore' was featured in Ishida debut solo exhibition, Drifter, in 1996. Today, other works that debuted in that show are part of Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art’s permanent collect...