“What can I do in this pandemic? What will become of humanity?” The Japanese illustrator-turned-artist stopped asking himself these questions and simply focused on painting, resulting in a body of work that marks a major departure for his practice. Familiar motifs of pin-up models, female wrestlers, and familial portraiture appear alongside mundane symbols embedded in our current reality—socially distanced individuals, the figure of former president Donald Trump—that now hedge on absurdism in the wake of this past year’s events. Faceless, abstracted, and newly shell-like, they produce unbalanced optical experiences and inscrutable narratives that prove unsettling emotionally and visually.

Wrestling Playmates (2021). Photography by Kenji Takahashi.