Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 28
Abstracts
Panel 8: Composers and Their Mewses
18:10 – 18:25
Creation and
Appreciation
The Cat as Image and Metaphor Between Feng
Zikai’s Painting and Musical Writing
Xinyun Zhao / University of Cologne
“My heart is occupied by four things: the gods and
stars in the heavens, the arts and children on
earth.” This was the spiritual confession of Feng
Zikai (1898 –1975), a prominent modern Chinese
music educator and painter. Throughout Feng’s
long creative career, two seemingly unrelated
themes—cats and music—consistently appeared
in his paintings and writings. Whether capturing
the gestures of cats or reflecting on the meaning of
music, Feng’s observations and expressions are
marked by subtlety, lightness, and lyrical fluency.
This paper argues that Feng’s aesthetic process,
which begins in sensation, moves through
judgment, and arrives at constructed meaning,
reveals an underlying belief: that forms of life
which are agile, free, and non-utilitarian are most
capable of evoking the goodness and beauty within
human nature. This sensibility, embodied in his
depictions of cats, reflects his belief in an aesthetic
of protecting life and art as a way of life. These
values permeate his approach to music education
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and visual expression, shaping a distinct
aesthetic
practice
grounded
in
ethical
“Selbstzweck” and synesthetic perception.
After making a lifelong vow of “protecting
life”, Feng spent 46 years creating the
Protecting Life Album (Husheng Huaji), in
which the image of the cat becomes a symbolic
convergence of his artistic ethics and religious
sensibility. This article takes the imagery of
cats as a point of entry, combining Feng’s
musical pedagogy and historical context with
textual and visual analysis, to explore how the
cat is transformed into an aesthetic symbol
imbued with musicality and spiritual depth. It
further demonstrates the cat as a unique
intermediate between Feng’s visual art,
musical thought, and humanistic ethics. In
these works, cats and music are not only
aesthetic mirror-images of one another, but
also vital conduits for beauty, moral
cultivation, and compassion.
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