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Design Festa Gallery: Happy Meow Year

The Design Festa gallery is a permanent exhibition space in Harajuku that is dedicated to showing off the talents of young and upcoming artists in Japan. Although a wide variety of art is showcased at the Design Festa gallery, some artists work in the anime and manga industries or are strongly influenced by anime-style art.

Today's article is about cats. Every January, the Design Festa hosts a big gallery about cats, inviting over sixty artists to participate. For the week of January 5th-11th, the east and west halls were filled with creative cat designs. Let's take a look at some of them.

The artist Cheeze Sam (チーズサム) draws lots of cats in kimono. Very fitting to celebrate the New Year in Japan!

This is an illustration drawn by the artist Mofuko, comes from the “Fluffy Group Tail Exhibit” (Honwaka-gumi no Shippo-ten). It's named that way because the art feels like the fluffy tail of a cat. This is the group's fourth exhibit.

Some of the art can be unusual too, like this egg box with cats in them from the West Art Pocket area created by the artist Nekoyuki.

There's also these pot plant cats made by an artist called cha.tsuchi from the West Art Piece area.

In the East 101 area, the artist Chiaki Tokunaga made her Design Festa Gallery debut with lots of plushies and illustrations of a gluttonous cat.

In the East 102 corner, artists Sasurai Nekoya and MaHou teamed up to show off a gallery of cat illustrations for stickers and postcards. There was also this pouch with a languid cat on it created by the artist PandaB.

This bag says: “For storing things that aren't important.”

To cap things off, here's a statue of a cat wearing an octopus on its head, by an artist named Fukuneko Yokocyou from the Ishikawa Prefecture.

For more information about the exhibits, check out the cat exhibit page on the Design Festa Gallery blog (Japanese). You can also find out more about the Design Festa Gallery by checking out their official website (English).