Izumi Kato

From Shimane to Tokyo and Hong Kong

Izumi Kato was born in 1969 in Yasugi, in Shimane Prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, and graduated from the department of oil painting at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. He did not arrive quickly. He first came to public notice through group exhibitions in Tokyo in the middle of the nineties, and spent the following years showing in small Tokyo galleries before institutional attention arrived. In 2001 the Contemporary Art Gallery at Art Tower Mito gave him a solo presentation in its Criterium series. He now lives and works between Tokyo and Hong Kong, and is married to the artist Naoko Kameyama.

Figures that were always there

Kato paints and carves a single recurring subject: a frontal, pale, large headed figure with wide set eyes and a small body, often with the limbs pressed close or the hands held open. The figures suggest embryos, infants, dolls and the small carved deities of Japanese folk religion all at once, without settling on any of them, and critics have described them as at once tender and faintly unnerving. He is known for laying oil paint down directly with gloved hands rather than with brushes, which gives the surfaces their smeared, worked, slightly thumbed quality.

Almost everything he makes is left untitled. The refusal is deliberate: without a title the viewer has nothing to lean on and must deal with the figure directly. He has named Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and the Edo painter Ito Jakuchu among his influences. Having begun as a painter he moved into sculpture in the middle of the two thousands, carving in wood and painting the surface, and later working in soft vinyl, stone, fabric, leather and stainless steel, so that a single installation may combine several of them.

One of those carved wooden figures acquired an odd second life. A photograph of it was used, without his involvement, to illustrate the first entry of an online horror writing project, and the image circulated for years among people who had no idea it showed a sculpture in a Tokyo collection. Kato eventually gave permission for the non commercial use on condition that he was credited, and the photograph was later withdrawn.

Museums and the Biennale

In 2005 his work was included in Little Boy at the Japan Society Gallery in New York. In 2007 the curator Robert Storr, who found the work harder edged than most contemporary Japanese art reaching the West, invited him into the Italian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Solo museum exhibitions followed at the Hakone Open Air Museum in 2010 and the Kirishima Open Air Museum in 2012.

His gallery career widened through Perrotin, with solo shows in Paris in 2014 and New York in 2016, and a Tokyo exhibition devoted entirely to his lithographs in 2017. That same year he was included in Japanorama at the Centre Pompidou Metz. The Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing gave him a solo exhibition in 2018, and in 2019 the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo mounted Like a Rolling Snowball. In 2020 he appeared in a textile exhibition in Hong Kong, the city where he keeps his second studio. His work is held by the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Long Museum in Shanghai and the Red Brick Art Museum.

The market

Kato's market runs mainly through Hong Kong. In 2020 Phillips sold one of his oil on canvas figures there for 875,000 Hong Kong dollars including premium, and in 2021 another canvas made a little over four million Hong Kong dollars including premium against an estimate a fraction of that size, which remains the shape of his auction market: unique paintings competitive, everything else considerably below.

Below the paintings sit the sculptures, and below those the editions, of which there are many. Lithographs, prints on paper and the soft vinyl figurines issued alongside exhibitions are all genuinely his and all trade in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Because the works are untitled and the imagery is consistent across decades, the date, the medium, the dimensions and the edition number carry almost all of the information a specialist needs, so a photograph of the reverse of a canvas or of the numbering on a sheet is worth more than a description of the image itself.