How Izumi Kato’s curious creatures found fame in LA

We all have a vision of Los Angeles in our heads before we see it for the first time. Sepia-drenched streets under a canopy of palm trees; big lips, small dogs, green juice, neon lights and a climate ripe with dashed dreams and dogged ambition.

Japanese artist Izumi Kato visited LA for the first time last month. Before he went, I asked him what the city looked like in his imagination. The response catches me off-guard: “LA might be a dangerous place, with a lot of gangs,” he said over Zoom, via an interpreter, from his home in Hong Kong. Fortunately, Kato’s trip was not as perilous as anticipated, but it wasn’t insignificant: he was there during Frieze LA to inaugurate the first permanent LA space of his gallery, Perrotin, in a former movie theatre on Pico Boulevard.

Perrotin’s LA expansion follows pop-ups in the same space last year. “More and more of the gallery’s artists have connections to the West Coast, and Los Angeles in particular has a lot of energy in creative fields like music, film and dance, which I hope we’ll be able to tap into by establishing a presence,” says founder, Emmanuel Perrotin, who enlisted LA architectural royalty Johnston Marklee to head up the renovation.

The building’s history was part of its allure. The Del Mar Theater opened in 1939, at the height of Hollywood cinema’s Golden Age, before shuttering in the 1980s. It reopened as a church, then a series of studios, before it caught Perrotin’s attention. The vertical neon sign and marquee entrance remain intact, but instead of movie stars, it’s the artists who get their names in lights. “Its ticket booth and poster frames immediately struck me as interesting sites of intervention which artists could enjoy working with,” Perrotin reflects. “From the outset, it was important for us to acknowledge the site’s cultural significance and identity; restoring the ‘DELMAR’ neon sign and the marquee is integral. We want the site to inspire artists from diverse cultures and backgrounds with its sense of place and history without detracting from what the artists choose to do here.”

So, why choose Kato to inaugurate the space? “Part of what I find so compelling about his work is how his figures are simultaneously prehistoric and contemporary,” says Perrotin. “On the one hand, their forms can seem almost protozoan or prehistoric, yet at other times they also seem like futuristic beings.” This contradiction and “spiritual kinship”, as Perrotin notes, is what binds Kato to LA. “You can encounter tar pits and utterly timeless elements of nature like oceans and mountains, while there are also urban areas with expanses of concrete.”

Kato was born in 1969 in Japan’s Shimane Prefecture. He has become known for his otherworldly creatures that merge prehistoric with pop. But when it comes to his work, he’s a man of few words. There are some concrete influences: Shintoism, Buddhism, Animism. Oh, and fish. When I ask about the latter, his face animates. “Fishing was part of my life very early on. My father was a fisherman and I grew up in a port town in Japan,” he recalls. “It was something I would do with friends during the day, and eat the fish for dinner.” It was during fishing trips that he first began collecting stones to use as material for his work. His creatures do have curiously aquatic characteristics: curling tailfins, googly eyes and swollen lips. But really, they don’t look like they’re from anywhere, land, sea or sky. Their origin story, it seems, stems exclusively from the inside of Kato’s head.

He has studios in Tokyo and Hong Kong. He works alone, apart from some assistance with canvas stretching. He also has a third space outside Tokyo for woodwork, which he shares with other artists. “I start by making coffee and listening to music so that I’m in the mood, then I will paint solidly until 5 pm,” he explains. I get the impression Kato has a sharp wit, but the jokes are delayed, and sometimes entirely lost in translation.

Kato has often said that his creatures are not representative of specific beings or people; consciousness over-representation. But there are clues. Kato grew up in a baby boom. New toys, superhero characters and cartoons were everywhere. One was Ultraman, a slick, red and silver alien character who originated in Japan and later became a global phenomenon. Another was Kamen Rider, a half-man, half-insect. “I’m not directly influenced by them, but it’s probably part of my unconscious memory,” he says “The fact that I use figures that look like humans is intentional because I want the audience to react when they see something similar to their being.”

For Kato, music came before art, but now they exist in parallel. “When you’re young, you have different motivations for being in a band. Sometimes you want to be cool or popular among girls, or even go professional.” For the last seven years, Kato has been the drummer for a band called the Tetorapotz whose members are all visual artists, it’s part hobby, part performance art, and all fun.

Before he was able to commit fully to art, Kato worked part-time on a construction site. “Looking back, during those years I really had time to reflect. It was a really important time,” he says. “It was quite heavy labour work and the people I met there, so many different people, inspired me to think about who I was.”

Kato’s exhibition marks exactly ten years since he joined Perrotin. It all began in Hong Kong when he was introduced to a gallery director. “I used to work with Japanese galleries, but they closed down, so it was good timing”, he recalls. Later that year, Kato met Emmanuel for the first time in Paris, ahead of his second exhibition with the gallery. There, he rubbed shoulders with other members of Perrotin’s roster – such as Sophie Calle, Jean-Michel Othoniel and Xavier Veilhan – and felt an immediate affinity with their work.

His LA show features paintings, alongside sculptures in wood, stone and aluminium – all of which are, somewhat predictably untitled. “I primarily see myself as a painter, so it’s very important that paintings are a main feature of the show.” These works are astonishing; rich-coloured, jarring, alien creatures swirling in a Francis Bacon meets Futurama frenzy. The figures are often split over two canvases, making each look like an exquisite corpse or a sci-fi Frankenstein with different bodies sewn together. “I like joins and joints. Not just in my artworks, but in general,” Kato explains. “Like the wrinkles where the body parts are connected.” Kato paints with his fingers. “When I draw a line with a brush, that’s something that other people can do, but when I use fingers, the outcome is always unique,” he says. “I see my fingers as tools and have very delicate control over them, like rolling a small ball over the canvas.”

Kato is also exhibiting a plastic model kit, an edition inspired by childhood memories. The kits are also available to purchase in the gallery shop, offering owners the chance to build their own miniature (plastic) versions of his stone sculptures. This, it could be said, gets to the heart of Kato’s thinking – that actions speak louder than words and sometimes, the machinery of imagination is more powerful when left unexplained.