Cat and Cat Statue

Cat and Cat Statue is a sōsaku-hanga woodblock print in the F12 format, catalogued by ukiyo-e.org under Kasamatsu Mihoko's name. The composition juxtaposes a living cat with a ceramic or stone cat figure — a pairing of animate and inanimate that gives the image a gentle humor uncommon in shin-hanga and more characteristic of the postwar creative-print sensibility, where artists allowed themselves narrative and even whimsical subjects.

The print belongs to a wider strain of cat imagery in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, a lineage that runs from Hashiguchi Goyō and Takahashi Shōtei's early shin-hanga felines through to the celebrated cat prints of Asai Kiyoshi and Inagaki Tomoo in the postwar period. Cats have long held a domestic place in Japanese visual culture — as the maneki-neko figures that the title here invokes, as the famous Edo-period cats of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and as informal household companions in the woodblock tradition. By bringing a real cat into dialogue with its sculpted double, Mihoko's print places itself self-consciously within this lineage while also commenting on it.

Formally, the F12 sheet allows the figures room to breathe. The textures are likely to play across the print: the soft, varied fur of the live animal against the smooth, glazed body of the statue, both set against a quieter background plane. As is typical of postwar sōsaku-hanga, the palette favors restrained, naturalistic colors rather than the bold flat fields of earlier ukiyo-e cat prints. The print is signed and sealed in the pencil-signed manner standard for postwar mokuhanga and was issued in a small edition through Japanese dealer channels rather than under a major publisher's imprint.