Where’s Waldo for cat lovers: photo book of shop and market scenes in Hong Kong and mainland China invites readers to find furtive felines
- Photos in Spot the Shop Cat, the fourth in photographer Marcel Heijnen’s Chinese Whiskers series, often require a long look to find the hidden animals
- The book also explores the history and culture of cats through Stephen Case’s quirky illustrations
“Miaow.” Hong Kong-based Dutch photographer Marcel Heijnen heard the softly uttered sound while walking down a small alley in Shanghai in late autumn last year. After spending about 10 minutes trying to locate the source, he saw the black and brown cat resting in the eaves of a fruit shop.
“It was almost like the cat was playing a trick on me,” says the 56-year-old, who quickly took a snap of the scene. A year later, the photo has been included in his latest book, Spot the Shop Cat, which invites readers to participate in the game.
The fourth in Heijnen’s Chinese Whiskers series (the first being his 2016 book Hong Kong Shop Cats), Spot the Shop Cat focuses on the lives of felines in a more comical way, marrying Heijnen’s documentary-style photography with cartoons by Hong Kong-based Australian illustrator Stephen Case, a former art director at the South China Morning Post.
With “where’s the cat?” as the unifying theme, each photo requires a long look to find the animal amid a messy and chaotic shop or market scene in old areas of Hong Kong and mainland China – the kind that might soon disappear as a result of gentrification.
“If you look at some of the photos, you only see the background,” Heijnen says. “In a way, the cat is part of the background. That’s the beauty of these stores and markets.”
