SHHANart
SHHANart explores how different gestures and postures allow the same feline form to be perceived as distinct beings. Between characteristically feline movements and sometimes humanlike attitudes, small bodily differences suggest different personalities, emotions, and lives.
SHHANart is a series of 20 digital drawings that observes cats’ bodies and postures to express the attitudes of different beings. Created after 《Crowned》, it moves away from specific symbols such as the crown to focus on the feline body itself.
The cats stand upright, curl up, lie loosely on the floor, stretch, leap, or gaze into the distance. Although they share the same animal form, differences in bodily direction and weight, gaze, and the movements of tails and legs give each an entirely different presence.
Most cats are simplified around a black body. Backgrounds and surrounding objects are kept to a minimum, sometimes with fur and facial details reduced as well, so that silhouette and posture emerge first. Some cats appear watchful; others seem indifferent or relaxed. Still others suggest playfulness or an amusing awkwardness.
Whether these emotions accurately describe the actual state of a cat is not the point. Looking at a familiar animal’s body, people interpret its posture through their own experiences. The feline body becomes both an animal body and a form that reflects human emotions and attitudes.
The cats in SHHANart have neither names nor specific stories. Nor are they repeated depictions of a single fixed character in different scenes. Yet each appears to be a distinct individual. Minimal differences in posture and silhouette prompt viewers to assign different personalities to them and sometimes imagine their state of being.
Here SHHANart connects with the earlier 《Crowned》. In 《Crowned》, beings bearing the same crown adopted different postures and attitudes. Where that powerful symbol provided a starting point for considering desire and existence, SHHANart removes the mark and brings gesture itself to the foreground.
The 20 cats share similar forms, yet none appears to be exactly the same being. SHHANart looks to the body and movement for the smallest units that create this difference. A being’s uniqueness may not depend only on explicit information such as a name, face, or narrative. Small differences in how it moves and responds to the world can also distinguish it from another.
Following Crowned, SHHANart was also released as an NFT collection in 2021. The 20 works were issued on the Ethereum blockchain, and the complete series and its historical records can now be viewed on OpenSea.