Tùng Nâm is a young Vietnamese artist whose work ranges widely, including landscapes, book covers, stamps, and, of course, cats. The Colossal gives a selection of his art, which you can also find on his Instagram and Behance page (links below). The text:
Accompanied by delicate insects and social betta fish, the cats in Tùng Nâm’s illustrations (previously) alternate between curiosity, serenity, friskiness, and determination. The artist portrays a diversity of feline natures, merging their likenesses with flowers, waves, foliage, and clouds.
Nâm’s characters are playfully anthropomorphized, donning patterned kimonos and hair ornaments. The series emerged organically from practice sketches of flowers in the ukiyo-e style.
“I felt like it was missing something, so I tried to add a cat as the protagonist,” Nâm tells Colossal. “Somehow it still doesn’t feel right, so I think of adding a companion—fishes, butterfly, dragonfly—like they were encountering each other in a specific moment.” Fittingly, he called the series An encounter.
An accompanying collection, A Floating World, takes further inspiration from the genre, directly referencing the Japanese word ukiyo. The term describes a hedonistic lifestyle in Edo—now called Tokyo—in the 1600s, spawning a style of art that captured the mood and interests of the period. Famed artists like Hokusai or Hiroshige focused on woodblock printing and painting to represent scenes from history, folk tales, kabuki actors, flora and fauna, landscapes, and more.
For Nâm, ukiyo-e provides the starting point for exploring a range of subject matter. He’s currently exploring ideas for further illustrations that incorporate different animals and visual cultures.
Find more on the artist’s Behance and Instagram, and click below to see more cats:
From Instagram:
The cover of what looks to be a Kafka book, but I wasn’t able to translate it:
The artist:
Go here to see his designs for 15 stamps depicting animal species endangered in Vietnam.
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And here’s a short video of a cat roaming through the history of art. The Facebook caption says this:
Image of the cat through art history ⏳🐈 Via @fibulamedia 📹 makegallery
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Do our cats love us? The “happiness reporter” of The Globe and Mail, Erin Anderssen, gives us an ambiguous answer. Click below, or find the article archived here:
The ambiguity!
When Montreal cat behaviour expert Daniel Filion speaks at conferences in Canada and France, he often gets asked the same question: Do our cats love us?Mr. Filion, who founded the company Éduchateur in 2007 and goes by the Cat Educator in English, used to answer bluntly: No.
“But the reaction I got from people was very, very negative,” he says, including one woman who marched angrily out of the room in protest.
He has since learned to play philosopher. “What is our definition of love?” he now asks when the subject comes up before an audience of veterinarians, shelter staff or cat owners. If we mean the kind of sacrificial love where you put the interests of another before your own, he says, “then no, your cat doesn’t love you at all.”
But if you mean the love where you value the person who adds something to your life – security, tuna, a warm lap – well then, he says, “your cat loves you very, very, very much.” He wraps up his talk to applause, and cat owners depart much happier.
Here of course he is using behavior as an indicator of love, but that’s okay. As you might guess, the aloofness of cats results from their not having been bred to do specific jobs, but also because wild dogs, including the gray wolf, the ancestor of all dogs, is a social animal, while there is only one species of wild cat that is social, and it ain’t the ancestor of house cats. (Do you know the social cat species?) More:
It’s not surprising that dogs evolved into the perfect companion animal. For at least 15,000 years and likely much longer, they have been deliberately bred and trained to work and live well with people.
Their ancestors enjoyed the easy meals that early humans left in garbage on the edge of camps. Mutual fear became amiable appreciation. Dogs learned to protect people, pull them around and help them hunt, and eventually became today’s typically unemployed, entirely dependent fur babies that take long naps on our beds and bark to be fed.
But cats are more of a puzzle, says Peter Pongracz, an animal biologist at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who was one of a few scientists studying cognition in cats back in 2005. “Cats had to take a much longer journey,” he says, to find their way into our homes and hearts.
Unlike the social wolf-like animal that became the domestic dog, a cat’s ancestors were “miserable, solitary animals who hated other cats,” Dr. Pongracz explains. But cats more comfortable with humans encountered humans more comfortable with cats. They became revered (and were also sacrificed) as divine creatures in cultures such as ancient Egypt, and valued, over the centuries, for their skill at dispatching rats from kitchens and ships. But aside from a few pedigree breeds, most kittens are still the result of random hook-ups, and cats have retained their wild independence.
Miserable? Hate? This is pure cat-dissing, even though the points are largely true. One might as well say that dogs are obsequious, which they are. More:
As Dr. Pongraczputs it, cats do not need us – unlike dogs, if we vanished tomorrow, cats could hunt to survive – butthey are content to benefit from us.“Dogs perfectly adapted to the human environment,” he says. “Cats perfectly incorporated humans into their environment.”
And new SCIENCE!
When they can be persuaded to co-operate, however, cats have been challenging the dog’s unique people-whisperer status – even to the surprise of cat-owning scientists such as Dr. Pongracz. In a significant finding in 2001, for example, members of his research team confirmed that dogs could reliably follow directions when a human pointed. Five years later, Dr. Pongracz was co-leading a similar experiment using cats as a reference for how dogs performed, and discovered, unexpectedly, that the cats could also follow finger-pointing to find hidden food.
Cat research has since surged ahead. Studies suggest that cats know their own names, as well as the names of their pet siblings. They can distinguish their favourite person’s voice from a stranger’s and learn new words quickly.They recognize and respond to human emotions, such as anger and happiness. And, like dogs, when presented with two bowls of food, cats will typically go first to the one a person last touched, even if they watched it being emptied, a sign that they’re taking cues from humans.
. . . Even the idea that cats are strictly solitary, Dr. Niel says, merits re-examining. When food is plentiful, she suggests, cats actually prefer to live in a social group, which is why you see them happily snuggling with their animalco-habitants in all those TikTok videos. A study published in January found that domestic cats also tended to mimic the expressions of their fellow felines – a behaviour common among humans and other animals that’s meant to signal goodwill.
. . . According to Dr. Udell, cats can learn pretty much anything dogs can – and often more because of their physical abilities. In classes at Oregon State University, they master the usual tricks, such as sit, stay, lie down and play fetch. The more extroverted graduates walk on leashes; one student now happily accompanies their human on kayaking trips.
And while 40 per cent of the cats in the classes are most motivated by food as a training reward, Dr. Udell says about half prefer affection or praise from their owner – a finding that also places them on common social ground with dogs.
And isn’t that the whole point of all this new cat science? Cats are who they have always been; understanding them better requires humans to adapt. Perhaps we should also worry less about whether cats love us, and think harder about how well we are loving them.
Here’s a BBC video telling you how to read your cat’s feelings from its face (the link is in the article). It also shows that cats appear to read OUR feelings. It’s a good video, so watch it.
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Two items of lagniappe today.
First, a black cat sings the blues:
And a well-paid movie cat:
h/t: Reese, Lianne
Do they love us? Check to see if they produce oxytocin when petted, stroked, sitting on a lap, when they see us come home. Then we’ll know. Their behavior is ambiguous, but their chemistry may tell all.
Exactly what I was thinking.
They do, actually. They also show the «secure base effect» like dogs and humans, meaning that the presence of their human is a buffer against stress. The journal Applied Animal Behavior Science published many of these studies that show that we have a lot of our beliefs wrong about cats.
Domestic cats are considered a «facultatively social» species. Where resources are plenty, they live in colonies just fine. There are feral cat colonies in Rome, Ottawa and Turkey – some Turkish feral cats even routinely sneak into fishermen’s boats to ride along with them for the day.
That’s one of the main differences that has an impact on our relationship with them vs our relationship with dogs. Dogs are not just social, they’re «hypersocial». They have a fixed mutation at a loci associated with the Williams-Buren syndrome in humans that was under positive selection pressure since they diverged from wolves. Dogs can crave positive interaction with their humans as much as they do food, awake fMRI studies showed (the downside to dogs’ need of their humans being welfare issues like separation distress).
https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw102
It would be cool if someone managed to train cats to stay still in scanners like dogs so we could get clues from their brain activity on how they perceive us too.
The other big difference in our relationships is that dogs are a lot more bribe-able than cats. They can be bribed for long bouts with praise, pets, play, food… Labrador and flat-coated retrievers, which you see a lot in work roles, even carry a mutation on the POMC gene that increases appetite. The fact that it’s so easy to motivate dogs to do what we want makes them a lot more trainable than our feline companions. However cats too can be trained, socialized or educated (and enjoy it), a lot more than most people believe. That just doesn’t fill a need for them as it does for dogs.
I like to say that the difference between having a dog and a cat is like that between having a faithful husband and an independent lover.
A really interesting post, thanks!
I loved Tung Nam’s graphics. The cat and the dragonflies was gorgeous.
Great Caturday post! I’m impressed with the cat blues singer. She/He is good.
Woke up this morning, no food was in my bowl.
Said, I woke up this morning, no food was in my bowl.
I’ve thought it before, man
My hooman’s got no soul…
Apologies in advance!
When I was growing up in the 70s my family always had both dogs and cats. The nicest cats I have ever known were raised with dogs as well as cats. If a kitten grows up with a big dog friend or two to idolize, the cat absorbs some of that good doggie nature.
Our neighbors always complimented us for having unusually friendly and happy pets. Of course they were happy. There was a whole gang of them. They had each other for company and play as well as the love they got from the humans.
I agree with you. There’s nothing better than a home with at least one dog and two or three cats. It brings out the best in all of us.
They learn to love us as much as they can.
I recently watched Flow, and it was of course amazing. The whole family of all ages really got into it. And to think it was made entirely from free animation software (Blender) on a tiny fraction of the budget of a Pixar movie.
Talking about the kind of “sacrificial love where you put the interests of another before your own,” isn’t that what free-roaming cats do when they bring you a present?
“Here’s a slightly-injured mouse! I could keep it and play with it myself but I want you to have it.”
Google Translate tells me that the book cover text at the bottom says, “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets,” and adds that it is a quote from Haruki Murakami’s novel “Kafka on the Shore.”
Terrific book, by the way. It made me think of Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” not in subject matter but in its fantastical elements.
Great roundup.🐈🐈🐈
Can other people see the Instagram ones without opening the app? I can’t.
Enjoyed this so much. Great illustrations and little cat art animation.
Thank you for all these lovely animal posts.
With all the evidence we have, scientific and personal, I think that anyone who has no scruple considering that animals very different from us «see» should not have qualms concluding that their cat loves them when she behaves like it.