Looking at Animals in Japanese Art : Figurative Sources as Primary Interpretive Resources in the Chiossone Museum Collections.
Animals belong not only in nature and their own "non-human otherness", but they also live in the worlds of imagination, divinity, religion and magic. At times they fulfill the human quest to reach inaccessible skies, lands of bliss, and remote paradises. At other times they represent human merit, temperament and virtue, as well as defect, impurity, sin or vice.
Their contribution to the development of the arts is not limited to the exploitation and use of their own bodies - skin and bones, tegument and teeth, fur and hair, shell and horn. In truth, human civilization itself could not have developed without Animals, and appears totally unthinkable without them.
But Animals are useful, indeed, not only as utilitarian commodities and exploitable resources. They function also as immaterial tools. Their images have been helpful for understanding and representing the temporal cycle and seasonal changes, as well as depicting, knowing and exploiting environmental resources. Not only that: Animals are used as symbols in the religious, mystical and philosophical universes, as well as in the imagerie and menagerie of amusement and satire.
As status symbols and commodities, Animals' images reveal an impressive amount of information concerning the construction of practical ideas and metaphors developed by and within Japanese society to represent itself, its ranks, powers and weaknesses, expectations, ambitions and wishes for a better life, both in this and the other world.
Exotic and rare animals and their images are also important part of Japanese political and cultural history. As captive witnesses to the progressive extension, colonization and victory of Civilization and Man over Nature, in the past they used to constitute the pride possessions of the powerful, and in the modern and contemporary age, the caged hostages of zoos. The historical vicissitudes of Animals' physical exploitation and extinction mostly coincide with the colonization of marginal regions and their environmental transformation - i.e., in ultimate term, with political history itself.
This presentation will be illustrated by several works of art belonging to the Chiossone Museum, which will be analysed as primary figurative sources and interpreted against the backdrop of Japan's cultural and political history.
