The only time I’ve ever seen a lifelike imprints on pillows was way back in the early 2000s when those photos of nerds from Japan with their ‘girlfriend pillows’ started doing the rounds on the internet.

Given the unmistakable intended use of such pillows, naturally I’ve been highly cautious of any pillow I’ve seen since then that even has the slightest resemblance of a real world object.

Thus, it was with the most piqued curiosity that I stopped and slowly turned as I walked past a Henry Cats & Friends store down in Ximending.

From the outside, Henry Cats & Friends looks like some kind of weird cat pillow fetish store. Infact, in the dead of the evening (if Ximending has such a thing), realistic cat sized pillows are pretty much downright creepy.

Thankfully, despite walking away from Henry Cats & Friends thinking I’d stumbled across some new weird ‘why have a real pet when you can just buy a pillow’ craze in Taiwan, turns out Henry Cats & Friends isn’t quite so sinister.

So the story goes, Taiwanese artist Henry Lee was offered a job in Germany to work on an animated cartoon. The Art Director of the project was a man named Christoph and happened to be an old friend of Lee’s.

Wanting to present him with something special after realising his first gift of choice, a Taiwanese ceramic Koji art piece could be bought cheaply from an abundance of stores in Taiwan.

Not wanting to lose face, Henry then came up with the idea to paint two stones he had lying around from Taiwan’s east coast (as you do), with the image of cats (both Christoph and Lee liked cats very much).

Thus, calling it an art stone, Henry Cats & Friends was born. In 2003, Lee opened up an art studio and retail store to showcase and sell his cat artstones from the township of Jiufen, in Taiwan’s north.

Obviously these Henry Cats as they’re called have taken off since then and business must be pretty good, as I can’t image rent in Ximending, one Taipei’s most trendiest hotspots, comes all that cheaply.

If you don’t know what you’re looking at, I guess a bunch of life-sized cat pillows does leave you with a bit of a ‘uh… what?’ feeling as you walk past.

When I first ran across this store I didn’t have time to go inside and take a look, but I’ve got a good mind to venture up into Jiufen and check out Lee’s original store and art studio now.

Who knows, I might even find a unique artstone cat of my very own to take home.

In the process of writing this article and going over my original store images, the pillows haven’t really grown on me but those little adorable cat artstones certainly have!

Stay tuned.


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