Photo: Yusuke Sato  Courtesy of Iwami Art Museum  ©︎2025 Izumi Kato

On a detour to the unknown

Izumi Kato’s solo exhibition “Road to Somebody” at the Iwami Art Museum is a large-scale retrospective that traces the artist’s 40-year career from his high school days to the present. Encompassing around 200 works, the exhibition aims to explore Kato’s personal history and provide an overview of his art. An artist with a global profile who currently divides his time between Tokyo and Hong Kong, Kato was born in the city of Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture. This exhibition, held at a museum in his home region, transcends the interest of Japan’s cultural industries and art journalism, making it a historic event likely to remain in the memories of many.

The exhibition begins in Gallery 1 (Gallery D), which contains the first and second chapters of the display. These sections trace Kato’s evolution from early oil paintings as studies from his high school days in Shimane, when he loved soccer and music, through experimental pieces from his twenties—created while he was an art student in Tokyo and while working various jobs including construction after graduating—to a number of representative works from his thirties. In these later pieces, he consciously developed his own creative style, finding a new expressive outlet in figures of young children. Chapters 3 and 4 introduce works from his forties and beyond. These include challenging explorations of line and color in drawings and paintings, and compositional and formal experiments combining multiple canvases. Also featured are three-dimensional works using materials like wood, stone, soft vinyl (Sofubi), plastic models and fabric, alongside video recordings of drawings created on sandy beaches. The concluding Chapter 5 conveys Kato’s recent free and unrestrained artistic realm, featuring woodblock prints on Japanese paper, works on hanging scrolls created using pastels and acrylic paints, and wood carvings combined with stone, and even mass-produced items like limited-edition soft vinyl figures and plastic models.

Then it’s on to Gallery 2 (Gallery C), titled “Drawing in Space,” where a vast space flooded with natural light streaming in from above is treated as a giant canvas. A dynamic installation unfolds here, boldly combining massive sculptures made of wood and aluminum cast in the shape of stones, textile works suspended from the ceiling, and paintings on the walls. If Gallery 1 contains a diachronic presentation that retraces Kato’s career chronologically, this space offers a synchronic response that leverages the museum’s open-plan architecture. After encountering Kato’s latest installation works here, visitors proceed to Gallery 3 (Gallery A), titled “A Small History.”

Here, alongside comparatively modestly sized paintings and lithographs, small items like soft vinyl figures and plastic models—created as artist merchandise, yet transcending mere toys or commodities to become integral parts of Kato’s artistic universe—along with limited-edition books, records, and posters, are displayed within tightly packed glass cases. Furthermore, the exhibition presents original artwork and collaborative projects relating to the many commissioned works Kato has created for companies and individuals, showcasing his collaborations with corporations and artisans. It also features footage of his musical activities with two bands, which represent another significant form of artistic expression for him.

Photo: Yusuke Sato  Courtesy of Iwami Art Museum  ©︎2025 Izumi Kato

Photo: Yusuke Sato  Courtesy of Iwami Art Museum  ©︎2025 Izumi Kato

Photo: Yusuke Sato  Courtesy of Iwami Art Museum  ©︎2025 Izumi Kato

Photo: Yusuke Sato  Courtesy of Iwami Art Museum  ©︎2025 Izumi Kato

Seeing the title “Road to Somebody” displayed at the entrance, I couldn’t help but recall James Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown,” which I’d seen not long ago. That biopic depicts the turbulent journey and personal growth of Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), who, still retaining traces of boyhood, arrives in New York from rural Minnesota in 1961. The protagonist encounters heroes of the music world and new companions, eventually becoming the Bob Dylan we all know. During the course of this film, Dylan, a small-town boy, is shaped by the tumultuous times and attains fame and glory through fateful encounters and betrayals, growing from a thoroughly unknown teenager into a fully-fledged “somebody.” Similarly, with this exhibition, Kato publicly reveals his formative self for the first time, telling the story of how a chance encounter led him to discover his means of expression and how he immersed himself in artistic study. The show also discloses how, during a period in the early 1990s, he was drawn to Basquiat-style graffiti art, received institutional education at an art preparatory school and art university, and then repeatedly experimented with expressive forms in apparent reaction to that education. Furthermore, works from the period when Kato worked in architecture while painting images combining human figures with buildings reveal the psychological anguish and daily hardships he experienced at the time. These pieces, created during the slumps he frequently faced, express the agonizing struggles and poignant realities of unfulfilled artistic expression.

If anything, the most interesting aspect of this exhibition might be the contrast between the narrow paths of exploration and experimentation hidden within these preparatory works and pieces from Kato’s slump periods, and the astonishing trajectory of continuous improvement evident in each subsequent work after emerging from such a phase. Certainly, Kato’s works after overcoming a slump bear the imprint of experience; a confidence born from surmounting anguish and struggle. Yet this radiance is also the fruit of the stoic experimentation he engaged in when things were not going his way, when his predicament seemed devoid of any solution. By comparing these periods of soul-searching with the subsequent liberated state of his spirit, viewers can glimpse the creases of Izumi Kato’s unique soul. Just as a boy who was “nothing” became Bob Dylan, Kato too undergoes an irreversible metamorphosis, from larva to chrysalis to adult. The exhibition lays bare that transformation—Kato’s road to becoming “somebody.” It reveals his maturation as an artist without denying his naive and vulnerable attributes, as well as his journey to the global stage.

What seems crucial here is that Kato did not grow up surrounded by art, nor did he hone his technical skills in an art club during his student years. To put it bluntly, he was, in a sense, an ordinary high school student from a rural part of Japan. While his young eyes were treated to the rich folk culture of Shimane and the animistic landscapes of the countryside, he lacked access to the latest contemporary art or to sophisticated galleries and museums offering compelling exhibitions. The question of whether art truly exists in rural Japan is a popular topic in online debates. As a high school student in Yasugi, Kato seems to have grown up immersed more in youth culture like plastic models, soccer, and music than in the art world. Precisely because of this, all his works possess a wild, unconstrained quality—one fundamentally different from the tastes and talents shaped by a particular cultural environment, and untamed by industry conventions or cultural norms.

Untitled, 2024  ©2024 Izumi Kato  Photo: Kei Okano

So at the outset of the three-part exhibition, the audience encounters works by Izumi Kato, the high school student from Shimane, alongside pieces by this young artist created when he attended art preparatory school and art university. The viewer is gripped by the raw vulnerability characteristic of adolescent emotions that seeps through the works’ unpretentious purity, and by the sense of spiritual hunger and trepidation that pierces their technical and conceptual clumsiness. This is not necessarily the glorious success story of a provincial boy smoothly achieving artistic triumph. Rather, it is a tale of countless narrow paths and detours; the story of how a troubled soul, harboring unknowable desires and dreams, grows while embracing his physical imperfections and spiritual loneliness, evolving into a formidable artist who nevertheless carries some equally unknowable burden. Perhaps the exhibition can be understood as the story of how a “human form”—strangely captivating, being both terrifying and cute, eerie and absurd, and lonely and happy—is born and grows while remaining an inexplicable entity.

The possibilities hidden within that image remain unknown. At the very least, here through Kato’s work, we encounter a vigorous desire and hope that is never fulfilled, transcending predetermined harmony to advance toward the next stage of life. That energy is dazzlingly intense, yet so fragile, as if it might vanish at any moment. I believe Kato’s appeal lies in his talent for channeling this bipolar energy into viewable form without taming it. The venue overflows with the imagery of a soul in the process of healing, the joy of rebirth beyond the conflict between life and death, and the artist’s astonishment at discovering sublime beauty within and beyond their own world. There can be little doubt that “Izumi Kato: Road to Somebody” offers visitors a profound, indelible visual experience, along with a subtle sense of transformation.

Translated by Ilmari Saarinen