The Shimane-born native began his artistic career several years after he graduated from the Musashino Fine Art University. His paintings are of an evocative quality that explore issues of identity and the shared existential tensions within a consumer society of contemporary Japan and the world at large. His techniques overcome the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration through creations that focuses primarily on his imagery, unlimited by the confines of the structures of logic and reality. Kato has exhibited extensively throughout his artistic career and was invited to the Venice Biennale in 2007 with an exhibition 'Think with the senses, Feel with the mind' where his works were singularly conspicuous. The Venice Biennale's catalog contained a collection of favorite texts from the artists and references books by Takeshi Kaiko and the manga works of Osamu Tezuka and Ryoko Yamagishi, which essentially may be deemed as a source of inspirations for the artist.

"Untitled" feature primitive creatures depicted as an abstract form of child like anatomy that seems to be deprived of mobility, with a coat of transparent gel covering three embryonic heads and a face that encompass the traits of a child and yet they also look geriatric against the boundless aqua blue background. Superficial information such as nationality, race or name, is stripped from these figural heads and the viewer is immediately captivated by the direct gaze of the central subject, which extends to two smaller figural heads on either side like the powerful vitality exuded by blooming plants. The eyes of these figures resembles dogu from the Jomon period of prehistoric Japan, a figurine that is connotative of shamanistic rites and fertility. In essence, the work may initially appears abstract and grotesque, but in fact the artist is giving us an extremely concrete portrait of an unease he recognizes in us all.

The three vulnerable and expressionless heads appears to be tormented by an extreme hollowness. Likewise, by numbing our sensitivities amid the flood of information and temptation that typify current society, we must suppress our emotions and at times be devoid of sensitivity for purposes of survival. The painting that Kato derived at by discarding various factors are a portrait of present humans, and they are also in fact, a portrait of ourselves. Psychiatrist and art critic Tamaki Saito has pointed out the resemblance of Kato's work to that of the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), whose distorted human forms also seem to suffer from a psychic pain they cannot articulate . The sense of anxiety and confusion conveyed by these figural heads produces an intuitive recognition of ourselves in his work and carry the potential to weave out various emotions and
stories from the viewers.

Interestingly, Kato does not work with a brush, but applies paint by hand over a vinyl glove. The artist
wanted to task himself the difficulty of painting with the hand and eschewing the ease of the brush. He admits "I'm always skeptical, so I even doubt myself. Hence, it is better to paint in a way that doesn't proceed easily." To chose such a difficult way of painting seems to be inline with a dictum against a modern Japan where everything is easy to procure, and can be interpreted as a gesture of the artist's frustration with contemporary society.

The appeal of Kato's paintings lies in his ability to
portray the depth of the human unconscious and entice the viewers to contemplate upon the energy that the very primitive life possesses, a realm that cannot be easily explained by words or logic. Through the classical techniques of painting, Kato
practices an unrefined yet direct, sharable, real artistic expression in a contemporary world while magnificently balances both aspects of depicting the real world and the subjective expression by employing himself as the medium in an objective and
detached manner.