Where Mountain Cats Live



Woodcut-based art installation / The Negotiation Table series / 2025



Where Mountain Cats Live is an investigation of material culture, an homage to the 'imagination of the oppressed,' and a love letter to my mother and extended communities who in the face of many uncertainties maintain a sense of home.

Click to read more about Where Mountain Cats Live

Where Mountain Cats Live is a lush invitation for strengthening community bonds, while acknowledging the precarity that we often build our roots upon. Via table-based installation, prints, and accompanying artist’s books, artist Jenie Gao collapses layers of global and local colonization, childhood memories, and familial narratives of home, displacement, and perseverance, embedded in individual objects.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is the iconic ‘lazy Susan’ table, a post-colonial innovation emblematic of Chinese American and Canadian restaurants. The table features hand-carved images of rabbits and cats in a cyclical chase, from a story that Gao’s mother tells of her bravery while facing ‘mountain lions’ outside her childhood home on a mountainside in Keelung, Taiwan. The work captures a moment when a mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, and as Gao deals with their present-day dilemmas: the predatory realtors encroaching upon their mother’s home in rural Kansas, increasing pollution and land destruction, and the hope of native flora and fauna that nevertheless persist and return.

Where Mountain Cats Live is an investigation of material culture, an homage to the ‘imagination of the oppressed,’ and a love letter to Jenie Gao’s mother and extended communities who in the face of many uncertainties maintain a sense of home.

woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Gallery view of art installation at grunt gallery, circular table in center, rows of framed prints on each side


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Gallery view of art installation at grunt gallery, circular table in center, row of four framed prints on right side


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Illuminated glass vitrine with two circular artist's books (Yuǎn Yuàn)


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Close-up of back wall of gallery with mirror reflections illuminating wall, mahogany dining chair for seating, magnifying glasses, and tactile copies of artist's books on floating shelf


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Four monotype prints, Color of Jade series: After Felix Gonzales-Torres' Forbidden Colors, title wall


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Four monotype prints, Color of Jade series: After Felix Gonzales-Torres' Forbidden Colors


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Two circular woodblock prints: True Rabbits, False Lions


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Close-up of magnifying glasses with view of tactile artist's book station on floating shelf


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Woodblock diptych of True Rabbits, False Lions in background; spinning lazy Susan table in foreground


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Close-up of glass vitrine, two artist's books illuminated (Yuǎn Yuàn)


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Close-up of spinning lazy Susan with mirror reflections in background


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Close-up of spinning lazy Susan, with inlaid hand-carved woodblock resembling jade in lacquered acacia wood base, on motorized turntable


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

View of art installation through the glass vitrine


woodcut installation contemporary art gallery

Still from Gao's video narration of Yuǎn Yuàn artist's book


Title: Where Mountain Cats Live

Medium: lacquered acacia hardwood circular base with inlaid hand-carved birch woodblock, 23” diameter + 2” high, motorized lazy Susan, circular table, long circular lilac tablecloth (cotton-linen-rayon), short square teal tablecloth (cotton-linen)
Dimensions: lazy Susan 23" circle diameter, table 41" circle diameter, installation footprint 12.5 x 25'
Photographer: Dennis Ha
Technical & Fabrication Support: Christopher Patterson

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