Atsushi Kaga “It always comes; a solace in the cat.”
We visited Atsushi Kaga’s solo exhibition “It always comes; a solace in the cat.”
The venue is MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY.
This marks Atsushi Kaga’s second solo exhibition in Japan, following his March 2018 solo show “The Search For Languorous Magic.” For a look back at the previous exhibition, please refer to the article below.
“It always comes: a solace in the cat”
When it comes to portraits of mothers, several paintings come immediately to mind. For example, the mother looking straight at us, painted together with the father who had just started reading a book by David Hockney. Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 is an extraordinarily unconventional composition for a portrait. Lucian Freud painted many close-up portraits of his mother. All the paintings, even if that was not what they intended, somehow reveal their relationship with their mother.
While my mother was alive, I never painted a portrait of her. Looking back, my performances with my mother were infinitely close to being portraits of her. Or perhaps they were portraits of my mother. At the exhibition venue, my mother, I think, existed as a universal symbol of a mother. In the end, I simply presented my mother as a work of art.
Although it is grandly called a performance, it is really just my mother sewing a tote bag that I had specially made as a child. And I would draw pictures on that tote bag. Recently, while watching the video documents of our performances together for editing, I noticed that the relationship between my mother and me is clearly shown.
My mother appears in several paintings in this exhibition as a dead fox. The exhibition title “It always comes” comes from a painting I made when Kirin Kiki, my favorite actress, passed away in 2018. In the painting, Usacchi is depicted facing a handmade sign reading “END” at the edge of a cliff. In other words, “It” refers to the end. Unfortunately, the end always comes.
But it also refers to life in another video of this exhibition. Whitesocks, a black-and-white cat, is shown repeatedly coming to my studio in Callan, Ireland. This neighbor’s cat came to our place — or rather, lived at our place — nearly every day during the last six months of my stay in Callan. She was a source of inspiration and solace. Not just death, but life too, always comes again.
That period coincided with the time when my mother became ill and later passed away. It made me think about life cycles and rebirth.
Many of my recent paintings feature cats. My sister says the dead can come back and see us through the eyes of cats. Just now, while translating this text from English to Japanese, I noticed that the character for “cat” is very similar to the character for “to draw/paint.” I like cats very much, and I like to paint.
Atsushi Kaga
Atsushi Kaga’s popularity has been rising in Asia, including auctions at Art Basel Hong Kong and Christie’s, and the show opened in a heated atmosphere with everything selling out on the first day. Since relocating to Kyoto, his motifs have shifted, and the response around him has also changed.
At Art Basel (Switzerland), which ran concurrently with this exhibition, Atsushi Kaga’s work was also acquired by major collectors.
With an upcoming residency in New York and a solo show in London on the horizon, an ever-larger future spreading out to the world awaits him.
