Take Ninagawa is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition of paintings by Soju Tao, "CAT." This is the first in a two-part series of solo exhibitions by the artist at the gallery.

Throughout his career, Soju Tao has explored the alter-ego to as a means for accessing different modes of creative potential. Previously, he has made works under the name of a quasi-fictional production company, Okame Pro; or from the perspective of imaginary figures such as Andy Watanabe (the Japanese Andy Warhol); or in order to develop narratives around characters with names like Kiss Boy and Bonnie the Dog.

The works in "CAT" develop from an attempt to understand the perspective of Soju Tao, an emerging Japanese contemporary artist. Ranging in size from a few square centimeters to several square meters, these new paintings employ elemental brush strokes, minimalist composition and high-contrast palettes to depict scenarios featuring a cartoonish cat figure. One large-scale canvas expands to almost billboard size the torso and and head of the yellow cat figure, outlined in black against a white background. Another diptych focuses on the cat's whiskers - two characteristic black squiggles - which become gestural abstractions when isolated against white color fields.

Part of a broader project questioning what it means to make art in Japan today, each work in "CAT" comments on how the use of representation, composition, scale and referentiality in painting are affected by local social, economic and cultural conditions. Combining structuralist discipline with Pop figuration, they experiment with new possibilities for both visual and critical expression.

About the Artist

Soju Tao was born in 1977 in Tochigi, Japan, and is currently based in Tokyo. In 2002 he earned a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and in 2003 joined the MFA in Painting program at SLADE School of Fine Art before returning to Japan without a degree. Working under the label Okame Pro, Tao makes drawings, paintings, installations, videos and music inspired by the cheap production capabilities of Xerox copy machines. Okame Pro’s 10 employees include artists, poets, musicians and writers, almost all of whom are actually Tao himself.

Recent solo exhibitions include Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery’s “project N” series of solo shows for emerging artists in 2007 and Gallery JChen, Taipei, in 2009. Tao was selected by Sophie Calle for inclusion in the “CHANEL: Mobile Art” art exhibition that toured to Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York in 2008, and that same year was commissioned to make a special design for the Bloomberg BloomBus! shuttle service by the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. In 2009 he was included in the prestigious annual exhibition of emerging artists “VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art” at Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo.