Where Mountain Cats Live – Exhibition Opening Reception + Artist Talk Dec. 4!

Where Mountain Cats Live,

Jenie Gao.

Curated by Katrina Orlowski.

Opening and Artist Talk Thursday, December 4 | 6 PM to 8 PM.

Running December 4, 2025 to January 17, 2026.

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 stubborn resilience 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.

Jenie Gao (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts business since 2014. They have a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Through advocacy, Jenie has become attuned to issues of artists’ labour, cultural power, and institutional accountability. Their work is in 40 institutional collections including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Stanford University, and the Library of Congress, and has been exhibited, collected, and published in the US, Canada, Germany, and more. Jenie was recently appointed the Executive Director of Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Learn more about the artist and exhibition at:
grunt.ca/exhibitions/where-mountain-cats-live/ 

grunt gallery

116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V5T4R8.

Phone: 604.875.9516

Hours of operation: 

Tuesday, Friday, Saturday (Noon to 5pm). Wednesday and Thursday (Noon to 7pm.)

Stay tuned for a workshop announcement in relation to this exhibition by following grunt’s Instagram or Facebook page!