Hope VI

Kato builds this totem out of extinction stock: a lion's head roaring up through a carved trunk, a bald eagle fused into the center mass, a rhino fading into speckled atmosphere on the right, a zebra's torso wrapped in streaks of red. Rising out of the top of the pile is a chimeric bird whose wings aren't feathers. They're solar panels, angular and navy, catching a shaft of light that rakes in from the upper left corner.

This is the sixth numbered painting Kato has built around this same welded, chimeric animal. Kato has described his broader body of work as tracing the connections between nature, technology, consumption, and survival, shaped in part by witnessing the aftermath of Fukushima. Hope VI is where that project gets literal: the wings powering this creature forward run on stored light, not instinct.

A lion, an eagle, a zebra, and a rhino have already been rebuilt to survive on infrastructure instead of habitat. That's the version of hope Kato trusts: an engineering solution, not a eulogy.