While contemporary art is still transfixed by its own reflection, veteran Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa has focused her cultural microscope on something quite different. "Bunny Smash Design to touch the world," the current group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, is a hit-and-miss exploration of how design is intermingling with science and art (MOT).
This intermingling is nothing new (Japan's media arts festivals and museums are testament to that), but it's the thread weaving these strands together that makes this show notable. Or rather, threads. The show has a number of divergent themes, but essentially they're all about new ways to "touch" (and not just look at) the world that we are "out of touch with," says Hasegawa. The works pose unusual solutions to our modern problems — from surviving natural disasters in walled cities and creating machines from plants to solving East-Asian conflicts through competitions on a floating U.N. baseball stadium (part of a sarcastic series of works by Yosuke Ushigome).
This is a show about alternative futures proposed through critical design, a relatively new field pioneered by Anthony Dunne, author of "Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming" (2013). In the show's catalog, curator Hasegawa writes: "Using design in this manner overlaps with contemporary art in the way that it critically challenges the status quo."