On a placid lake at the Nordic-themed Metsa Village park in Hanno, Saitama Prefecture, a giant inflatable feline in a neon-orange spacesuit lies curled on its own island.
A peek inside reveals it’s a nesting cat doll of sorts, filled with smaller cats diving, napping or painting classical art. Called “Ship’s Cat Island,” this creation of artist Kenji Yanobe can be accessed only via boat and is part of Hyper Museum Hanno’s inaugural exhibition of the same name that runs through Aug. 31.
Yanobe has been tackling thorny social issues with various lovable characters since the 1990s, and his spacesuited felines will be familiar to those who have visited the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka or Tokyo’s Ginza Six shopping complex last year. In front of the former, a cat statue stands as if a guardian, while in the mid-air display titled “Big Cat Bang” in Ginza Six, two space mousers ride through the lofty atrium on a spacecraft modeled after Tower of the Sun, the postwar artist Taro Okamoto’s avant-garde monument for Expo ’70 in Osaka.
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