Some of the artists will be the first time to show in Japan. With artists from Japan, France, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, the Americas and Brazil, the exhibition takes a cross-cultural look beyond the traditional notions of innocence and fertility into each artist’s highly specific meaning.
Adam Fuss provides a meditation on fertility and death, beauty and disgust, as his photographic plate decorated with rabbit entrails creates an undeniably aesthetic and sensual image. Indeed, the rabbit’s traditional associations with childhood, shyness and sexuality serve as fodder for a wide range of artistic explorations. BUN aims to articulate a collective portrait of the rabbit by exhibiting the diverse approaches of artists to the subject matter.
Representation of the rabbit has a long history, stretching back to its foundational modern image created by Albrecht Dürer. Dürer’s rabbit has a mysterious, grounded gaze, focused down at the worldly rather than up toward transcendence in the sky. It is connected to the land, an herbivore embedded in, not atop, the food chain. Yet the rabbit is frequently anthropomorphized as an animal of civility. Many of the strongest associations with rabbits are forged in childhood, through stories like Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, Brier Rabbit, the Easter Bunny and the Tortoise and the Hare. However, rabbits are killed and eaten as game animals, while simultaneously representing maternal power. In the exhibition, the vie
