Art Snack: Yamamoto Masao's black cat

• White head hairs balance the composition, and one breaks the frame.
• Everything beyond the cat's dark face is obscure.

Flashback: The artist has photographed a backlit bonsai tree so it looks like a lung X-ray and two white birds whose long necks form a perfect U-bend.

Masao's photos have long appealed to Western eyes for being typically Japanese: black and white, minimalist and open to nature.

• He prints them himself, experimenting with dyes and paper textures, so they feel like tiny paintings.
• They are like visual haikus, the refined squares and rectangles of traditional film that flourish on Instagram.

If you go: "Animal Spirit" is at PDX Contemporary Art through April 27.