The Hirano Museum of Art presents the first solo exhibition in a Japanese museum by Chen Pei-Yi (陳珮怡, born in Taiwan in 1984). Around thirty works gathered from Japan and abroad are shown together with new work being presented publicly for the first time.

Chen takes cats as her subject, joining close observation of everyday life to traditional painting technique. She works in jiaocaihua, the glue-and-mineral-pigment method closely related to Japanese nihonga, rendering the details of her subjects — the lie of the fur, the weave of a carpet — with great precision, so that familiar scenes take on a particular sense of time and presence. Drawing on visual elements from Japanese painting, art history, historical painting and textile culture, she connects classical expression with the ordinary scenes of the present day, developing images that carry a universal narrative quality.

Special Exhibition — All I Need Is a Cat: Chen Pei-Yi

About the exhibition

Chen Pei-Yi was born in Taiwan in 1984 and completed her graduate studies in fine art at Tunghai University, Taiwan, in 2011. She exhibited widely in Taiwan while still a student, and has been showing work in Japan since 2017. Well regarded in both countries, she has steadily widened the reach of her practice.

Chen works in kosai — painting with mineral pigments bound in animal glue — and takes as her subjects the cats she lives with and the rooms they live in. The cats in the paintings are her own. Their unforced gestures and expressions carry the deep trust built up by sharing a life day after day. Her fine brushwork gives the fur a texture through which softness and warmth seem to reach the viewer. What she paints is not only charm: there is humour and wit in it, and a reflection of human feeling and human society.

The carpets that appear again and again beneath the cats are, for Chen, a symbol of safety. Built up in mineral pigment with a raised, worked surface, they give the picture depth and a strong sense of touch, drawing the viewer into a quiet interior. Looking closely at these near-at-hand subjects, Chen brings together in a single picture what she has taken from East Asian painting, historical art and textile culture, together with the modelling and surface of Western painting and the language of East Asian classical painting. Grounded in classical technique and cultural history, and tied to the everyday scenes of the present, her work opens onto images that join tradition to the present day, Taiwan to Japan, and one culture and period to another.

This is Chen Pei-Yi’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Japan. Around thirty works gathered from Japan and abroad are shown together with new work made for this exhibition. We hope you will spend a quiet, close hour with these paintings of ordinary time passed in the company of cats.

Details

Dates: Saturday 31 October – Sunday 20 December 2026
Closed: Mondays (or the following day when Monday is a public holiday)
Hours: 10:00 – 17:00 (last admission 16:30)
Organised by: The Hirano Museum of Art and SHUKADO Co., Ltd.
Co-organised by: The Shizuoka Shimbun and Shizuoka Broadcasting System
Supported by: The City of Hamamatsu
Supervised by: Chiaki Tanaka (President, SHUKADO Co., Ltd.)
Special sponsor: Hirano Kosan Co., Ltd.
Admission: adults 800 yen, junior and senior high school students 300 yen, primary school students 200 yen (20 percent discount for groups of 20 or more). Free for students up to senior high school age on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

Contact

The Hirano Museum of Art (Sugiyama Tomotaro, Deputy Director)
166 Motohama-cho, Chuo-ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 430-0942, Japan
Tel: +81-53-474-0811 / Fax: +81-53-412-1808
Web: www.hirano-museum.jp
Email: info@hirano-museum.jp