Big Cat Bang
until summer 2025 (expected)
Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, 6-1-19 Minami-Aoyama, Minato Ku, Tokyo
Big Cat Bang by contemporary Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe is a large-scale installation in the central atrium of GINZA SIX. The nine-metre-long work depicts a scene from the story of countless space cats who landed on Earth aboard the “Tower of the Sun”-shaped spaceship LUCA. Meanwhile, the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum presents the background and details of the work. The exhibitions at these two locations come together to create one exhibition.
Kenji Yanobe, who grew up in Ibaraki City, Osaka, near the site of the EXPO’70, experienced the Abandoned World Exposition in his childhood. He has repeatedly said that it was a formative experience in which he faced the ruins of the future. Taro Okamoto’s “Tower of the Sun” continued to stand tall amidst the ruins, which became the starting point for his creations.
Taro Okamoto (1911–96) easily crossed genre boundaries, producing everything from paintings and sculptures to public art, architecture, photography, and design. Okamoto’s best-known work, “Tower of the Sun,” was installed in Osaka for EXPO’70. The sculpture depicts humanity’s past, present, and future on an overwhelming scale.
“We would like to present an explosion of imagination about the mystery of life and the universe, with the fantasy of Big Cat Bang on the theme of ‘Art is Explosion,’ as said by Taro Okamoto. As we stand today in a century of chaos and crisis, we must explode our imagination and creativity to achieve an overarching vision of the universe.” explains Kenji Yanobe.
About the artist
Kenji Yanobe (b. 1965) graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1991. Since the early 1990s, he has been creating functional large-scale mechanical sculptures on the theme of “survival” in contemporary society. His works, which are humorous and contain social messages, have been highly praised in Japan and internationally. In 2017, he began creating a series called SHIP’S CAT, travel guardians that carry good fortune. In addition to being permanently installed in Hakata, Kamakura, Kyoto, Takamatsu, Hiroshima, and Shanghai, the series has been shown at the Chouyou Art Festival (Fukushima, 2017), SHIP’S CAT (Paris, 2018), and the Shukusai-Celebration as a collaborative project with Setouchi Triennale (Takamatsu, 2019 and 2022). SHIP’S CAT (Muse) (2021) has been permanently installed as the symbol of the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, which opened in 2022. Professor at Kyoto University of the Arts and the director of ULTRA FACTORY.
