Cat’s Mine Labour: Nobuaki Takekawa
Opening reception with the artist: Saturday, 20 September, 4 – 6 pm
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is pleased to present "Cat’s Mine Labour", a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Nobuaki Takekawa (b. 1977, Tokyo). This marks the artist's third solo presentation at the Shanghai Gallery, following the inaugural exhibition “Cat Olympics: in memory of Torajiro” (2017) and “idling garden” (2021).
In recent years, Nobuaki Takekawa has continued to employ “Cat’s Ashio Copper Mine” as a recurring motif, spotlighting the dark heart of Japan’s modern industrialisation — the Ashio Copper Mine. Once a fundamental source for metal that fuelled Japan’s Industrial Revolution, the mine was officially closed in 1973. Later, it was re-developed as a tourist attraction, yet the traumas left by the mining industry never fully disappeared. Today, the human civilisation’s dependence on mineral resources has far exceeded that of the Meiji-era. However, under the filter of digital civilisation, this interdependent relationship has been rendered invisible.
In Cat’s Mine Labour Hanafuda (2025), Takekawa depicts a cableway to the naive and cheerful world of the cat’s mine. Following the rules of Hanafuda game cards, 48 acrylic woodcut prints divide the mining narrative into 12 groups of scenes — 4 pieces per group, progressing from prospecting and extraction to smelting. In these woodcut prints, cat miners weave together the quotidian life at the mine through their soft, furry labour. These labourers do not seek human pursuits of cultural capital and wealth. In their world, cat food becomes a flowing icon of value — sometimes crystallising into gleaming ore, sometimes drifting into clouds of sustenance, and at times transforming into slogan-like text. Through the eyes of cats, Takekawa’s print series traces the buried historical memory of Ashio Copper Mine.
Building on this approach, the paintings in the exhibition continue this gentle yet keen observations by Takekawa. The exhausted cat labourers in "About Living Like a Cat" (2025) gazes wearily at the sunset; the hungry figures in "Chimney Smoke Is Our Treat " (2025) dreams of a full meal; the toilsome labourers digging in "Eating as Much as You Want, When You Want" (2025); and the lonely drifters who have left their homeland, are depicted in "Being Grabbed by the Neck Reminded Me of My Cat Mother" (2025) — each painting is an affectionate gaze at the fate of individuals amid the tides of industrialisation. As the artist commented, “I try to depict those who have been concealed from this history.”
In this exhibition, Takekawa also presents paintings and sculptures created with the kanji characters for “Nintendo” as a central motif. The company which was founded as a manufacturer of Hanafuda cards before transforming into a video game giant, epitomizes the transition from a physical to a digital economy. When paper Hanafuda cards that were adorned with pine-and-crane designs were replaced by game cartridges, this revolution in the “virtualisation” of products becomes a prism, refracting a fundamental reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship with the material world.
Ota Fine Arts warmly invites you to enter the cat’s mine labourers’ world that the artist has constructed — a world where cats are both witnesses of history and prophets of the future.
