‘Cats are healing pets’: old city of Shanghai becomes magnet for selfie-seeking tourists as artist festoons walls and streets with feline art
- Giant photographs, inflatable statues and augmented reality sculptures of cats attract tourists as old heart of city becomes selfie central
- Artist behind the works reveals he was forced to use domesticated cats for photos because strays in the area were too difficult to photograph
The Old City of Shanghai has become a photo-taking magnet after an artist transformed one of its streets into a feline thoroughfare festooned with cat murals.
Shanghai-born artist and cartoonist Gao Youjun, known more widely as Tango, has pasted more than 30 images of pet cats owned by local families on walls along a stretch of Fangbang Middle Road.
The feline images were enlarged to fit three-metre-tall walls, making them appear much larger than the people posing next to them. Tango said by doing so he hoped to let visitors experience “a cat’s perspective”.
The Old City was located on the banks of the Bund in the southeast of today’s Huangpu District.
The cartoonist added that the idea of making feline murals was inspired by stray cats he spotted while walking along the street.
“These cats might have never left Huangpu District,” Tango said: “They are the real ‘Shanghainese’.”
One major difficulty he encountered was taking appropriate photos of stray cats, hence the decision to use pets instead.
In addition, Tango painted 30 or so amusing feline cartoons on the walls.
The 57-year-old artist and former advertising executive shot to fame as a cartoonist by posting daily cartoon creations on Weibo since 2010. He now has over 1.6 million followers on the social media platform.
On March 11, 2011, when a devastating 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s northeast coast, Tango painted two cats, one putting its paw around the other’s shoulder. On the cats’ backs, he painted the maps of Japan and China, writing above them: “Add oil, Japan!”
Both Yahoo News Japan and China Central Television carried reports about the cartoon.
A cat lover himself, Tango keeps three cats at home. His solo exhibition featuring feline cartoons has toured multiple Chinese cities since 2021.
On why he enjoyed painting cats so much, he told The Paper: “Cats are healing animals.”
Other than the feline murals, Tango also installed inflatable statues of cats and augmented reality sculptures of the animals with which visitors could interact in the squares near Yuyuan Shopping Mall and The Bund Finance Centre.
His exhibition is part of the third edition of the Bund Art Festival, an event that features Chinese and international artworks in interaction with the street views of Shanghai’s Old City.
People in Shanghai are likely not unfamiliar with the artistic fusing of large portraits and the urban environment.
French artist and photographer JR pasted the faces of elderly Shanghai locals on the walls of the city’s old buildings in 2010 as part of his The Wrinkles of the City project around the world.
