The exhibition “Cat’s Narrow Road” at Toyota Municipal Art Museum introduces contemporary artworks that evoke the freedom, wildness, humor, and nonsensical behavior of cats – unfettered creatures flowing back and forth between hollows –inside and outside– as they please, with the ability to deviate from linguistic order. In this show with six artists and one architect duo, the love for what we feel is familiar and the existences overlooked in society emerge not only in the simple representation of cats but also in the questioning of the ubiquitous. These artists’ and architects’ works appear in the exhibition spaces but further go out to decorate the ceilings, hallways, and even the tea rooms; through such stretches and inversions of space, they guide us to step out of our consolidated concepts of values.
　

Alongside works like Ken Sasaki’s “Neko” (2017), the painting of a cat used as the key visuals for this exhibition, installations such as that of Tam Ochiai’s “Ookii Teeburu (Oka)” (2023) with drawings, sculptures, objects, and articles of daily use displayed on a large table, recreate an organically connected hill with each piece in its own right and thus portray the capricious cats unconfined to a space. Emi Otaguro’s large-scale photographic work “sun bath” (2023) captured the human-shaped chewing-gum sculpture on top of a stray cat that visited the atelier and fell asleep unwary. In this view of a resting person made with gum chewed for relaxation in a field of cat fur, there are multiple layers of comfort.  
　

In addition, a range of artworks by Taro Izumi, Sayako Kishimoto, Teppei Sotome, Hideyuki Nakayama + Taichi Sunayama uniquely and freely inspired by cats are exhibited together. 

This exhibition catalog is composed of installation views intertwined with a few scenes of the exhibition seen from the perspective of cats. Essays and studies by Norimizu Ameya, Tomoko Shimizu, and Yoko Nose accompany the texts written by each artist. Like the type of paper that softens the whole book and the rough fore-edge mimicking the cat scratch, hints that physically remind us of cats are also incorporated in this book design by Daisuke Kano.

　
Artists: Taro Izumi, Sayako Kishimoto, Hideyuki Nakayama + Taichi Sunayama, Tam Ochiai, Emi Otaguro, Ken Sasaki, Teppei Sotome

Cat’s Narrow Road
February 25 – May 21, 2023
Toyota municipal museum of Art

Size: 210 x 150 mm / Paper / 210P

Texts: Norimizu Ameya, Tomoko Shimizu, Yoko Nose

Design: Daisuke Kano

Languages: Japanese / English

Price: 2,500 yen
Publisher: torch press 

ISBN: 978-4-907562-40-3 C0071
Year: 2023