Four years ago, the Kyoto National Museum reinstituted its annual series foregrounding the Chinese zodiac animals. It now celebrates China's Year of the Pig — Japan's Year of the Boar (inoshishi).
The original series of exhibitions began in 1901, starting with the cow, and cycled through to 1910 before being discontinued. This means the boar never had its day, or year, making the current exhibition the museum's inaugural celebration of the thematically unprivileged beast.
The boar is among the least popular, eye-pleasing, revered, or symbolically loaded of the zodiac animals, and "Boars Galore" features only a dozen or so works from vastly different East Asian times and mediums. Familiar though somewhat feared, the boar, more an animal of the hunt or the serving table, seldom inspired early Asian poetry. But it was mainly through poetry that an animal's aesthetic and theme became celebrated in later art. The exhibition's small scale reflects the scant artistic sentiment awarded the animal.
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