ShowheyKato

My works have motifs of things that pass by in everyday life that you don't
even notice, things that fall on the street and overlook them, and unnamed events and phenomena, and they have relationships on the screen, and that relationship continues even with those placed in the exhibition hall.


I believe that most of the things that have created and maintained this world have no name.

For me, specters, animism, mountain worship, and Shugendo in Japan may be close to that.
I'm trying to express a movement that can cross various boundaries by drawing, putting out, and picking up something that is not binary, that is absurd, but is certainly already here.

Like putting your hands on Jizo in a suit on your way to work.


Showhey Kato was born in 1983 in Shibamata, Katsushika-ku, Tokyo.

Moved to Amakusa City, Kumamoto Prefecture from 2005, and Fukuoka City from 2014. Since 2020, he has lived in Nomozaki Kabashima-cho, Nagasaki-shi.
Graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan Hachioji Technical High School in Applied Design. Dropped out of the Shinagawa Technical College Architectural and Residential Environmental Design Course.

He studied art, painting, photography, textiles, woodwork, crafts, and design since high school, and aimed to become an architect, but he got stalled due to a major accident.

As a result, he reconsidered the appeal of paintings and continued his production.
Since then, I experienced communication that transcends words, such as manufacturing and performance, through continuous art workshops at elementary schools and junior high schools.
As a result, I participated as a staff member in a workshop as a group of artists “Matatabi” at Goshourashima, a remote island in Amakusa, which they visited in 2004. I'm going back to my first place in Kyushu and my first time in Amakusa, and something unspeakable that remains in my heart. After that, they went back and forth several times during the year, and if they didn't know more about Amakusa, they couldn't face Amakusa, couldn't get down to earth, and decided to emigrate because they wanted to leave their hometown Tokyo.

The work “GO HOME,” which I drew right after that, superimposed on myself a wild boar that swims and desperately crosses the ocean in search of food and a place to live in Goshoura was selected for the public exhibition and sold, and I am delighted. At that time, I decided to keep drawing pictures for the rest of my life.

From the summer of 2005, I moved to a house where my room seemed to be attached to a former sawmill in Saizu-cho, Amakusa City, and drew pictures.
However, something fuzzy piled up, and suddenly, I thought about what I could do at this place, and when I saw a nearby grandmother walking to the field every day, she said, “How beautiful. I'm going to do what I can do here and now. “Let's do an exhibition here” and started and presided over the “Amakusa Regional Art Museum” in the summer of 2006 by renovating the house based on “the slow flow of time and the beauty hidden in everyday life.”
After that, it continued to operate so that Amakusa could function as a place of exchange between people from other regions through art.

As an individual, they gradually continued to exhibit in Kanto and Kyushu based in Amakusa, and in 2008 they performed “Tokyo Amakusa Walking Time” for two months because “I want to experience the sense of distance between Tokyo where I was born and raised and Amakusa where I live now.”
Around that year, the form of installations and performances using paintings, images, waste materials, soil, salt, soot, rust, etc. was practiced in earnest.

The Amakusa Regional Museum of Art suspended its exhibition in 2013/3 for the last time, but it was decided to create a new “venue.”
After moving their base to Fukuoka, they created and performed at sites all over the country while setting up a production location at the joint atelier Karma Studio.
In 2020, they moved to Nomozaki Kabashima-cho on the Nomozaki Peninsula, which they wanted from Amakusa, set up the Nomozaki-Kabashima Salt Mill, and cherish production on site while making salt.
Since 2023, he has presided over Artist Run Space Kabashima Storehouse.


[In other words, it's called a dancing weed.]

I don't know why I draw or what I'm drawing, and I don't usually think about it. But what I'm definitely saying when asked all the time is living itself. I mean, I also feel like that. But it's not just because I want to draw; after all, it's an insanely straight, extremely personal, self-contained infinite loop where the unknown of myself is expressed and forced to face it. I said that, but I also think it's just drawing and writing what I've seen and experienced right now.
It's not the normal that a lot of people think, it's my own normal, or rather normal. Draw the thing itself. However, in the end, the pictures alone became unsatisfactory, and <I think that's due to my attitude towards painting and my lack of drawing ability, but it makes me want to get involved. The current emotions, the environment, and the freshest current situation and feeling. That's why it would be nice if we could draw a line on the space itself, the reflection and composition change depending on where we look at it, the way we receive it changes, there may be rejection, there may also be discoveries, and there may be times when we can experience something we don't really understand in parts that aren't words, and that kind of small excitement fills Turk's everyday life, and I like it, but overlook it. It would be a waste to overlook it! You might think that such beautiful things, strange things, vivid things and moments, My Moments, My Moments, My Moments are stupid, and will they be that kind of money? There may be people who think something like that, but that kind of thing is the foundation of my life, and I'm sure. Also, minerals adhere to such things and exist as crystals. Drawing a line in this series of processes = saturation at that moment = crystallization, and that kind of thing is very personal after all, and well, for others, nothing, it's like weeds around here and there.
For myself, I thought drawing pictures = being forced to dance from the bottom of my heart, because it was my first intention.
I'm still thinking about it.


[About paintings and installations] Paintings exist

not only as paintings, but also as structures, and they resonate with the wood, words, images, and installations in other paintings and installations, and the relationships overlap.



First, what I always think about is why I'm drawing now, what kind of work I want to create, and what kind of

pictures I want to draw. It's very continuous, and it's changing day by day.
Now I'm experiencing firsthand the reality that “life is supported by death.”

I myself have also gained the feeling that I am alive through various “deaths.”

The death of a friend, caregiver, or relative.
The death of life we eat every day. The death of everyday time.
Even things such as minerals, air, microorganisms, etc., where you don't even know if “death” is originally there<死>It also makes me feel like it's blended in.

It evokes sadness, sorrow, and pure and fundamental feelings, and may be a factor leading to the original landscape; sometimes, it may lead to loneliness, fear, and ideological bias; and sometimes, it may make you realize that one's own progress and decline and spirit is alive now.

There is something like such a basic foundation, so to speak, and from there, things that arise from the core of emotions, scenery, backgrounds, and scenes that come from various phenomena around us and the environment every day intermingle, and a point of view with extreme objectivity intermingle to create one or many fragments (many dots and lines and their overlap).

<みずをはこぶ><か、える (ことができる) >,, <と、わになる> is inspired by my own latest emotions, environment, and everyday life.
I soak in seawater, look at Amakusa, think about the sea and the master who made salt, bathe in the morning sun and sunset light, think about the deceased, and let my consciousness flow into the ocean.
My master salt maker in Amakusa passed away last year.
The last words I received from that master, and the fact that a place to make salt myself was decided due to a sudden development right after my death, the scene where my master walks to the place I wanted to make salt and comes with a beer in one hand, and that image that qi flows into this Kabashima in Nomozaki where Amakusa can be seen along with various souls, and that spirit flows into Kabashima in Nomozaki where Amakusa can be seen along with various souls, and that it circulates around after all Pumping the circulating ocean, carrying it to a kettle, cutting waste wood, which is the final type of wood for houses made up of trees grown in the mountains, with a chainsaw as if it were done under the master, and burning seawater as fuel, and eventually, in the ocean<死>I experienced the fact that it was blended in step by step, so I expressed it with three points, and furthermore, “When Water Is Humped” and “Mukogawa [] (Mukogawa)” are works of acts, images, and places related to it, and furthermore, “Konseki/Taiji” and “Hikan/Ikou” are also places where I am now.

However, I would like to capture such things on a realistic daily scale, and write that it is a “pure painting” created with materials obtained where I am.

Among them, the works I have drawn up until now and my current work echo in the installation, broadening my interpretation.

I feel like that view of the world itself is part of the world itself that I see, the way I see it.