Japanese artist Izumi Kato’s humanoid hybrid creatures exist in a fluid space between worlds, hovering somewhere between ancient totems, unborn spirits and extraterrestrial beings. They emerge as sudden, epiphanic visions that reveal unprecedented truths about our evolutionary path while profanely suggesting new possibilities for more symbiotic and sustainable survival on this planet.
In just a few years, Kato has risen to international and institutional prominence, building a strong market presence through powerhouse gallery Perrotin and steadily climbing auction results. He has established a global reputation with a distinctive symbolic language and a sense of mystery and magic that unites Japan’s ancient folklore and Shinto spirituality with underground manga aesthetics and a contemporary, saturated visual sensibility that feels attuned to the world ahead.
As the artist further cements his status as one of the region’s most compelling names through his participation in the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan, alongside the major solo exhibition that opened at Perrotin during Seoul Art Week, Observer caught up with him to explore the meanings and messages behind his fantastical universe and the evolution of his otherworldly creatures.
Both in Kato’s soon-to-close show at Perrotin and in his works for Aichi, his biomorphic characters take on watery, fluid forms. Existing somewhere between human and aquatic beings, suspended in a plasmatic or amniotic dimension, they evoke the evolutionary arc from aquatic to amphibious to human life while hinting at a possible reactivation—or even inversion—of this cycle as a path toward ecological survival.
As Kato acknowledges, his painting practice continues to evolve. “Most recently, I’ve begun incorporating living sea creatures into my work,” he explains, noting that it’s been 30 years since he last painted while directly observing his subject. “Now, I paint these forms as I need them, as a way to express what painting means to me at this moment.”
His figures feel both ancient and futuristic, alien and human. Kato’s vivid primary palette heightens this tension. “Colors are sensory for me, and I use them intuitively,” he says. “I don’t begin with a fixed color plan; instead, I decide on each color one by one as I paint.” Balancing primal immediacy with an aesthetic partly influenced by the digital landscape is likely what makes his work so resonant for contemporary viewers.
While his figures do not directly reference evolutionary history, Kato sees the planet itself as a living entity in continuous transformation. “Earth is home to countless life forms, though definitions of life can vary from person to person,” he says. “I see the planet itself as a living entity. It’s something mysterious and deeply fascinating to me, and I find myself thinking about it often.”
Throughout his evolving practice, Kato has constructed an expansive symbolic narrative that envisions hybridization between species as an alternative path for humanity. Moving fluidly across mediums and often incorporating natural materials like wood and stone, his oeuvre feels like a continuous, urgent exercise in worldbuilding—a form of mythopoiesis aimed at imagining new destinies for human society. His work draws unconsciously from Japanese folklore and Shinto beliefs, though he clarifies that he does not intentionally reference any specific motif. Those connections surface organically, shaped by his personal and familial background.
Kato acknowledges that autobiography inevitably seeps into his art. “It’s hard to answer that clearly, but everything I experience in life affects me in some way, and those influences likely appear in my work, often unconsciously,” he explains. Painting, for him, serves as both a pathway and a tool to absorb, process and translate these personal traces.
“I’m definitely influenced by the local culture and upbringing I experienced in Shimane, where I grew up,” he says, recalling how parents would warn children about an imaginary sea creature—a snake with a woman’s face—that appeared at night to scare them away from the water. Kato’s paintings capture the same tension animating most fairy tales: the balance between innocence and menace. His figures appear childlike yet unsettling, gentle yet otherworldly—existing between birth and death, body and spirit, human and nonhuman. These myths, he reflects, ultimately serve as a form of survival wisdom. “I only realized recently how much the environment I grew up in has influenced my work.”
It is by inhabiting a symbolic third realm of myth and fairy tales—one that bridges the physical and the psychological—that Kato’s images achieve their universality, subtly conveying timeless messages about the nature of human existence. However, he says that he doesn’t view the recurring motifs in his work as characters, since they lack personalities and are not part of any linear narrative or deliberate storytelling. “I use human-like figures to strengthen the composition of the painting and to spark the viewer’s imagination,” he explains. At the same time, he acknowledges that these otherworldly, symbolic visions of alternative forms of life likely belong to another realm and time—whether future or past—where species coexist in harmonious hybridization before emerging in painterly or sculptural form. Kato admits it is difficult to articulate in words, but his paintings inhabit a memorial, imaginative and spiritual realm that precedes and transcends language, defying conventional categories. They speak both to and beyond the human, offering prophecies of alternative possibilities for cosmic life within and beyond this planet and time.
Kato’s figures often appear suspended in a distinctly plasmatic dimension yet animated by an inner radiance—a kind of energetic aura. “I don’t really know where it comes from, but I believe art itself is energy,” Kato says, responding cryptically when asked what this energy represents. “I’m glad one can sense that energetic aura in my work.”
In a time defined by destruction and chaos, the mythopoiesis underlying Kato’s epiphanic, profane and totemic works offers contemporary viewers a regenerative narrative reminiscent of ancient myth, reminding us that life, evolution, decay and rebirth are part of a continuous cycle. Mapping the liminal space between collapse and renewal, his hybrid creatures inhabit that threshold, carrying the deep knowledge that decay is never the end but a necessary passage. Suggesting a survival code rooted in eternal truths and expressed through symbolic language, Kato’s works—mythological in essence and, in the spirit of Joseph Campbell’s “metaphors for the mystery of being”—bridge our waking consciousness with the vast, enduring mysteries of the universe.
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