About

Cat Shadow Trend refers to a shadow art trend that involves a crouching participant creating a shadow of a cat with their entire body, similar to a shadow puppet, crossing their elbows and sticking out their fingers in such a way that their shadow forms a cat's pointy ears and whiskers. The trend achieved popularity in China in late April 2025 and later in South Korea in May 2025, with the photograph made the trend viral also inspiring a redraw art format.

Origin

In late April 2025, a shadow art trend which involved participants squatting and holding their arms and hands in such a way as to form a shadow of a cat achieved popularity on Chinese short-form video platform Douyin,^[11][12] with the trend using the 猫影子照片 (ch. "cat shadow photo") and 甜筒冰琪凌 (ch. "ice cream cone") hashtags. For example, on May 2nd, Douyin^[13] @小雨绵绵 posted a photograph of two girls doing the shadow that received over 105,000 likes in nine days (shown below).

On May 3rd, 2025, Doyuin^[14] user @果汁酒 posted a photograph of herself crouching down on a road while crossing her elbows next to her head and sticking out her fingers in such a way that her shadow formed a silhouette of a cat. The post (shown below) received over 386,700 likes in nine days.

Spread

On May 4th, 2025, Tumblr^[1] user insecure001 reposted the photograph. The repost garnered over 3,500 reposts and 5,600 likes in nine days. On May 8th, 2025, X^[2] user @bugbug000 reposted the image, captioning it, "milady," with their repost (shown below) garnering over 31 million views, 66,000 reposts and 670,000 likes in five days.

In the following days, multiple K-pop fans on X^[3][4] and Weverse^[5] requested K-pop idols to recreate the photograph. Starting on May 10th, K-pop bands and idols, including members of LE SSERAFIM,^[6][7] NMIXX and Enhypen, participated in the trend, copying the pose.

Notably, on May 10th, 2025, Norwegian-Chinese model Cindy Zhangyin posted an Instagram^[8] video in which she recreated the pose. The upload (still image shown below) garnered over 5.1 million views in three days.

Starting on May 9th, 2025, users on X / Twitter posted redraws of the original photograph that inspired the trend.

On that day, artist @Akiko_oc posted the earliest discovered notable redraw of the photograph, which used their OC character. The post (shown below) received over 1,700 reposts and 28,000 likes on X^[9] in four days.

In the following days, multiple redraws of the photograph went viral on X / Twitter. For example, on May 12th, 2025, X^[10] user @tabakko posted a fan art of VTuber Shirakami Fubuki doing the pose that garnered over 4,700 reposts and 44,000 likes in one day (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References