Visuals/PDF reference: Google Drive
Published 2026
Author: Kay Slater
Text to speech translation uses the Eleven Labs voice library.

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

(Instruction – Describe cover)
The title page features a cool plum background. Centred on the page, framed with a plum border, is a photograph of a round wooden Lazy Susan placed in front of a jade-coloured gallery wall, which displays two square-framed prints. Above the image, exhibition details read: ‘grunt gallery, December 4, 2025 to January 17, 2026.’ Below the image is the artist’s name and exhibition title: ‘Jenie Gao – Where Mountain Cats Live.’ The Lazy Susan features a hand-carved birch woodblock inset into a mahogany base. The relief carving depicts animals in motion, with its surface stained in duotone purple and green ink that echoes the two prints behind it.

Cover inside (front):

The front inside cover displays a short jade-coloured shelf mounted against a matching gallery wall. Three artist books are placed evenly across the shelf, each distinct in shape and colour. Below the shelf, a raised floor plinth is covered in square mirror tiles, casting sharp, angled reflections that spread diagonally across the south wall in a crown-like pattern.

⸻

Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lowercase in white on a black-painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
Where Mountain Cats Live
Jenie Gao

116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Katrina Orlowski
Writers: Katrina Orlowski and Whess Harman.
Design: Victoria Lum with Manon Fraser
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha

Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN number # 978-1-988708-28-7
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2026 grunt gallery.
Artwork copyright 2026 the artists.
Text copyright 2026 the authors.
All images courtesy of the artists.

Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Page 2 and 3:

A double-page image features a close-up, angled view of the circular mahogany Lazy Susan resting on a dark blue tablecloth. Inlaid at the centre is a circular woodcut print, carved and inked in a duotone palette. The lower half of the circular design is stained in jade green, while the upper half is inked in plum purple.

The composition is densely packed with detailed line-work. Two mountain lions and two rabbits chase one another in an overlapping, cyclical loop, forming a sense of movement and circular interdependence. The animals are nestled among flora including mulberry leaves and berries, tiger lilies, red clovers, and wild roses. The animals and plants are arranged so they blend and coil into each other, creating a hypnotic and continuous rhythm.

Page 4:

A single-page image set against a purple-blue background features a black-bordered photograph showing a close-up of the illuminated gallery vitrine containing two artist books from the Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 series.

One book rests on a thick, circular slab of mahogany bark. Its circular pages spill open from the top of the wood, fanning outward and draping onto the jade green vitrine surface. Each page alternates between printed magenta text and soft blue-green woodcut imagery.

Suspended above it, a second book is clipped upright in an alligator clamp. Its six folded pages are splayed outward, forming a rounded, spherical shape reminiscent of a paper flower or pom-pom.

The vitrine’s mirrored interior walls and ring of white LED lights create multiple reflections of the books, echoing their folded shapes and illuminating their surfaces from below.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Katrina Orlowski, Curator’s Introduction.” The text is a black sans serif, and the title is in italics.

Page 6 and 7:

The essay begins on page 6 in two columns and continues to page 7.

The essay reads:
Where Mountain Cats Live transforms the gallery into an intimate space, at once both a comfortable family room where meals and stories are shared, as well as a tenderly recreated archive documenting oral histories, material inheritances, and embodied personal experiences that would otherwise more than likely be lost or omitted from the records. It is lush and playful, but also vulnerable, delicate. Stepping into the gallery is like pouring over cherished mementos with a close friend, a heart-to-heart with quiet revelations, spontaneous giggles, and safe silences.

In one of our first meetings together, Jenie Gao and I bonded over our lingering longing to have pursued a career in archives. We share an appreciation for art as a record, and also as a crucial expression of personal agency over our own stories. Having both found our way to and through artist-run culture, this archival instinct is creatively productive rather than conscripted into stodgy (read, colonial) institutional fantasies of ‘objectivity’ and ‘professionalism.’ I’ve worked at grunt for over six years and counting in large part because our definition of expertise means bringing your whole self.

Gao’s work dissolves boundaries between the personal and political, converging the impacts of colonization at multiple scales within individual objects. This work is also a love letter, a tribute to their mother and extended communities who steadfastly and stubbornly manage to preserve a sense of home amidst ongoing precarity.

Set atop a spinning ‘lazy Susan’—a post-colonial innovation emblematic of Chinese American and Canadian restaurants like the one run by Gao’s family—an elaborate hand-carved woodblock is the titular work of Where Mountain Cats Live. Drawing on moments shared with their mother at her home in rural Kansas, this work evokes both the local flora and fauna that persist despite increasing environmental destruction in the area, and a story that Gao’s mother tells of her bravery while facing ‘mountain lions’ outside her childhood home on a mountainside in Keelung (phonetic pronunciation Jee-lung), Taiwan. Along with Gao’s letterpress book, Yuǎn Yuàn, which traces three generations of their family’s stories, this work is part of their ongoing series, The Negotiation Table. With this series, Gao invites us to consider “what the aesthetics of something like a common dining table can reveal about private spaces, public movements, and the longer arc of imperialism and geopolitics.”

The Color of Jade: After Felix Gonzales-Torres’ Forbidden Colors studies the unique characteristics of the revered stone meant to bring protection in times of need; and the distinct shape of a jade pendant gifted to Gao by their mother, carefully mended after it broke during a harrowing storm on a midwest winter highway. Some believe that when a piece of jade you’re wearing breaks, it has absorbed misfortune on your behalf; it also functions as an emblem of cultural memory and collective protection. The colours in this work also reference Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Forbidden Colors (1988), invoking the Palestinian flag and the late Cuban-American artist’s exploration of its colours as a powerful symbol of resistance and focus of political censorship.

At grunt we have been centring our curatorial efforts on the place we call home, the unique contexts of these Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh territories where grunt has operated for over 40 years, and where an escalating housing-affordability crisis has compounded challenging conditions for artists. Though Gao has not always lived here, having spent much of their life in the USA, in both their artwork and otherwise they demonstrate a deep attentiveness to how forces that have shaped this place are undeniably connected to the very same forces that have shaped their own life, their family’s history, and their creative practice. How colonial powers across lands and waters have uprooted and disconnected so many —and continue to do so here, in Taiwan, China, the USA, Palestine and elsewhere. And how all efforts towards justice and liberation are necessarily entwined with one another. While Gao’s work for Where Mountain Cats Live is borne from their personal experience and familial stories, it also speaks deliberately and directly to the large scale systems of colonialism, imperialism and geopolitics that have made ‘home’ hard to hold onto and led Gao’s family and so many of us to become uninvited guests on Turtle Island. Where Mountain Cats Live honours the ‘imagination of the oppressed’ and the dynamics of hybrid identity. The care required to carry these legacies forward is evident in every detail of Gao’s work.

Page 8 to 9:

The double-page image features the gallery’s west wall. In the foreground, partially out of focus, is the Lazy Susan sculpture resting atop the dark blue cloth-covered table.
Mounted on the wall in the background are four framed monoprints from ‘The Color of Jade: After Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Forbidden Colors’ series. All four works are portrait-oriented and displayed in identical grey floating frames, evenly spaced in a single row. Each print features an abstract, organic shape that repeats across the series, based on a broken and repaired jade pendant gifted to the artist by her mother. The colour palette includes gradients of lime green, cherry red, and grey.

Page 10:

A plum coloured page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image shows the southeast corner of the gallery, as viewed from the entrance.

In the foreground, centrally placed, is a circular table covered in two layers of linen tablecloth; an outer teal layer over a longer lilac underlayer. The table sits atop a low, square jade-coloured platform. This is the first image that fully shows the titular work with the Lazy Susan within the gallery space.

On the left, the east wall displays the two framed woodblock prints. In the southeast corner is a wooden 19th-century dining chair with a dark wood finish, an upholstered seat, and an open filigree back with a central lyre motif. Past the central table, and right of the chair, is the floating shelf with three artist books on the back south wall.

Page 11:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Setting the Table.” The text is a black sans serif, and the title is in italics.

Page 12 to Page 15:

The essay is laid out in 2 columns across page 12, interrupted by a page of images for page 13, and continues until page 15.

Page 13 again has a plum-coloured background, the same colour as the cover, which features two black-bordered photographs stacked on top of each other.

The top photograph is a close-up of the two True Rabbits, False Lions prints on the east wall. Displayed in floating grey frames, the textured paper edges remain visible. The left print fades from jade green at the bottom to plum purple at the top; the right reverses this palette. The mirrored colour shift reflects the circular motion within the prints.

The bottom photograph shows four Colour of Jade monoprints along the west wall. Each floating frame holds an abstract pendant shape, varying in colour and texture; from layered greens and bold reds to grayscale and patterned blue-grey. The torn edges of the paper float freely within the frame.

The essay reads:
In preparing to write for this exhibition, Jenie and I spent a lot of time discussing the stewardship of family stories within an arts practice, about the delicate balances of verifying memory and discerning when accuracy isn’t the most interesting part and deciding what comes into the exhibition space. When I’m talking to Jenie about this, I sense the care and protectiveness they have towards their family and how it brushes up against the circumstances that has made family a complicated topic, especially when it pulls in on caregiving for an aging mother frequently faced with navigating a complicated web of capitalist colonial institutions to continue to survive in the American Midwest.
There’s something Jenie said about the process of making the work for this exhibition that I keep thinking on. They said that before their father’s passing, and for many years after, his story overwhelmed everyone else’s. I also think about how despite their or our own best efforts, it’s impossible to perfectly preserve a family history. Instead of using the exhibition to tame the many different threads of our familial stories however, Jenie’s exhibition allows for their mother to expand the story outwards.

You’re first drawn into the exhibition space by the new work, Where the Mountain Cats Live. This circular table in the centre of the room with a carved woodblock inset to a rotating lazy susan top, comes from a story Jenie gathered from their mother of when she was a young girl. In this story, Gao’s mother explains having to climb the stairs outside of the building to get to her room, which was separate from the main family apartment. To do this, she also had to brave the mountain lions. Upon further investigation of the types of wild cats in the area, Jenie suspects this is a child’s imagination exaggerating what they’d seen because there are no records of large predatory cats in the area. However, in the work, they depict both a domesticated cat and a wild one; they become interchangeably true to one another.

There’s a sweetness to this story, emphasizing that for whatever complications there are between a mother and their adult child in the present day, there are still common experiences to find in past versions of ourselves. For those of us with imperfect relationships to our parents, a kind of tolerance and forgiveness can be found in imagining and extrapolating these younger versions of our parents. It’s not a perfect bridge, but it’s a place to try and understand one another. The maturity of Jenie’s work is in interpreting these new stories in such a way that allows for two truths be told; one being that there are mountain lions that took a small child great bravery to face, but also that even if they were more simply large outdoor cats, that the story is still good and offers insight on the teller that only became legible when the circumstances allowed for an intimacy to shift enough for the story to slip out.

The Negotiation Table series cannot escape the lingering refrain of “a seat at the table”, the acquiring of said seat being sold wholesale to millennials as the ultimate aspiration to effect change in the crumbling institutions around us. However, instead of interrogating the efficacy of that notion as a political art project, I think what Jenie has found in revisiting the motif of tables and their different cultural connotations is that these sites of negotiation require different forms of intimacy and we can exist outside of the aspiration of speaking back to labour, social and political cultures that weren’t made with us in mind. While their first table related work, 米 mǐ | uncooked rice took direct aim at the white, male dominated art world, Where the Mountain Cats Live and The Integrity of a Story (another work focused on the storytelling of their mother currently on view at the Alberta Printmakers Society in Calgary, AB) scales the site of negotiation to the familial where the personal takes the forefront but is still informed by how the domicile and its subjects are at the mercy of a dominant cultural narratives. In short, one story cannot be told without the other.

When I’m thinking of these different types of intimacy in this exhibition, something that cannot be overlooked is the new artist’s book, Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑. Included with the previous publications of Three Generations Happy Family and Dear Ma | Ethic, which have their own correlating pieces from previous exhibitions, Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 is paired with the central Where the Mountain Cats Live work.This artist’s book is exquisite; the pages are done in Turkish Map folds, unfurling into single letterpress printed pages each carrying selected familial stories; the stories themselves are loosely connected, more matched in tone than they are with any concern of being perfectly narrative. The technical craft of these works almost overshadows, but with a breath, allows for a moment to engage with the ideas in Jenie’s work on a quieter level. The pages are printed so that reading the book requires rotating it, again mimicking the rotating of the larger table work in the centre of the gallery.

I ask Jenie about their relationship to making artist’s books and we talk about creating different entry points to have an audience engage with the work. There’s no singular, perfect way to continuously work with family lore; different stories and relationships require different methods of sharing. I make the joke that the exhibition is the dine-in version of the work and the book is the take-out; the point being that they’re circumstances that bring out different engagements with one another. The opening, the dine-in, is a warm and bustling event with the sweetest array of intersecting communities having the opportunity to catch up and check in with one another. The take-out version of the work signals not a disengagement, but a more private and bespoke one.

What I find in Jenie’s work is an on-going interrogation of power structures and the relationships that live in and break out of them, coupled with a humbleness in understanding that these stories are continuous and unresolved. I never get the sense that Jenie is looking to create one perfect work that will encapsulate an all encompassing narrative of a multitude of perspectives and experiences, but that they are interested in putting themself into situations that will tease out more details to think through when it comes to the ethics of the stories we share and place into our practices.

Page 16 and 17:

This double-page spread captures the west wall of the gallery. The left-hand page displays the Color of Jade monoprints, while the right-hand page features a single chair and the exhibition’s wall vinyl.

On the left page, the four small, portrait-oriented monoprints are mounted in a row. These artworks have been previously described in detail on pages 11 and 13.

On the right, the green wall continues with white vinyl text in the upper right quadrant and, below it, an antique dining chair with a lyre-motif backrest and striped upholstered seat. This chair matches the one in the southeast corner near the artist books.

The vinyl reads Where Mountain Cats Live, followed by the artist’s name, Jenie Gao, in English and Chinese characters, then the curator’s name, Katrina Orlowski, and the dates: December 4, 2025 – January 17, 2026. Below are icons for accessibility options: Listen, Read, Scan, and Tap.

Page 18:

A white page with text. Artist’s name is bolded with their name in English and Chienese. It reads:

Jenie Gao 高皆倪 | 高韻馨 (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts
business since 2014, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice,
and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the
public sector on equity and ethics.

Jenie pulls from experiences as a person of Taiwanese-Chinese heritage and
a descendant of working-class immigrants. Prior to founding their business,
Jenie worked in the museum industry, public education, and lean manufacturing.
Through their cross-section of experiences, Jenie has become
attuned to issues of artists’ labour, cultural power, and institutional accountability.
They run a paid apprenticeship program and have thus far mentored
25 emerging artists.

Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St.
Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work is
in 40 institutional collections including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art,
Princeton University, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the Library
of Congress. Their recent exhibits include Museum of Wisconsin Art, Trout
Museum of Art, Burnaby Village Museum, Cedarburg Museum, and South
Bend Museum of Art. Their work has been included in publications such
as PBS, Shoutout LA, and Fête Chinoise. Their art residencies include
Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York; Art in the Park with
Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation: Decolonization, Art, & Culture;
Ma’s House in the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, New York;
Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Okoboji, Iowa; the Bubbler at Madison Public
Library in Madison, Wisconsin; Artist Campaign School in Chicago, Illinois;
Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Museo de Arte Moderno in
Chile. They are a TEDx Madison speaker and gave a talk entitled The Power
and Purpose of Creativity.

Jenie Gao is the recently appointed Executive Director of Centre A:
Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. They live on the
unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

On the bottom left of the page reads ‘Biographies’.

Page 19:

A white page with text. Author’s name is bolded. The bio reads:

jWhess Harman (he/they) is a member of the Carrier Wit’at Nation, a nation
amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation and
currently resides on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish
and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He doesn’t like cops and believes in land sovereignty
for Indigenous peoples across the globe, including Palestine. In his
arts practice he works primarily in drawing, text and textiles. As an independent
curator and occasional editor and contributor of art publications, they
prioritize emerging queer and BIPOC cultural workers and artists.

While working through many mediums, Whess is often working through
ideas of resistance, and works from the foundation of his identity as a queer,
trans member of Carrier Wit’at nation living away from his territories. They
position their Indigeneity as both a cultural and spiritual reality, as well as a
political identity. He seeks liberated futures alongside the many others who
share rage and despair in the face of the seemingly unrelenting shit-storm of
empire building.

Page 20:

An plum coloured page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image shows the artist booklet Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 fully opened and resting on a green plinth, its folded pages spread outward like a fan. The cut edges of the circular pages reveal overlapping curved shapes printed with teal linework and mauve text. A book’s cover lays on its side nearby remains closed nearby.

Cover inside (back):

The back inside cover displays the artist book Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 being handled by two white hands. The person gently fans open the curved pages, revealing both printed teal illustrations and segments of bilingual text. The book is partially lifted off the green plinth, showing how its round structure flexes in the hands as the pages are turned.

Cover (back):

This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation views of the show at grunt gallery.

End of alternative text catalogue.

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