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Our last meeting before the summer recess was held once more in Seisen University, which is admirably equipped for slide presentations. Professor Nobuo Tsuji, President of Tama Art University, illustrated his talk with pairs of slides and provided his audience with handouts describing the items shown.
Although his title spoke of "the Edo Period", Prof. Tsuji went right back to the origins of the appearance of playfulness in Japanese art. Although Japanese artists began basing themselves on Chinese models following the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century, they quickly developed their own tradition. To exemplify this, Prof. Tsuji took his first illustration from a book, Japanese Decorative Style, by Dr. Sherman E. Lee, where paintings of tigers by the Southern Song Dynasty painter Muxi and the 16th-century Japanese artist Sesson are contrasted; the Chinese painting is serious and realistic, while Sesson introduces an element of playfulness into his brushwork. Similarly, Johan Huizinga, in his Homo Ludens, has pointed to the playful heart hidden under the facade of Japanese seriousness. Such playfulness is not limited to Japan, but whereas in China and Korea it is confined to folk art, in Japan it was extended even into the art of the court.
The Yamato court applied itself seriously to studying continental religious art, but other facets of continental art were also introduced, such as the dynamic gigaku masks with their added touches of humour. But the Japanese could also add their own humour to religious objects. When the pedestal of a statue of Bonten in the Toshodaiji outside Nara was dismantled for repairs, many graffiti were found on it, presumably the work of the men assigned to apply colour to the statue; the lively drawings include wide-eyed rabbits and frogs, and caricatures that were probably of the artists themselves.
After moving to Heian (Kyoto) in 794, the imperial court still maintained its cultural interchange with Tang China. But the gradual collapse of Tang rule meant that the great flow of continental art to Japan was nearly halted for more than two hundred years, and it has been held that a purely Japanese form of art emerged at this time. The Fujiwara aristocrats frequently used the word aware, the sense of the mutability of things, and this is reflected in the art of the time. But at the same time they also sought out light-hearted things to enliven their spirits, which they would describe as okashi (modern okashii). An eccentric priest, Gisei Ajari, whose story is told in the Konjaku Monogatari, was a master of oko drawings, oko meaning "funny" in a commendatory sense. If he was not in the mood, he would not draw. Once when he was persistently pressed to draw something on a long scroll, he drew at one end a person shooting an arrow, and a target at the other, with a single long line between them representing the arrow in flight. It is not certain, however, whether this anecdote is factual, as the author of Konjaku Monogatari may have known the similar story of a Chinese artist who, when plied with wine in the hope that he would reciprocate by drawing something, painted a boy at one end of a scroll and a kite at the other, with a long string between them. Be that as it may, one can perceive a subtler and more impressionistic element in the Japanese drawing.
The esprit of this type of caricature sketch crystallized in emaki (scroll paintings) such as the Choju Giga. This substitutes animals for human figures, and shows monkeys, rabbits, frogs, foxes and deer at play in a rural environment. Another scroll, the Shigisan Engi, depicts an event in the life of the priest Myoren. He had a miraculous alms bowl, which would fly to the village to receive offerings of rice. One day the headman locked the bowl up in his storehouse, but it carried the whole storehouse full of rice bales back to Myoren. When appealed to, the priest returned the bales, one in the alms bowl and the others flying behind like a flock of birds. The same spirit of humour is seen in religious scrolls such as the Jigoku Zoshi, which depicts the pains of hell. In a kind of black humour, people are shown drowning in a pool of excrement, with very large beelike insects snapping at their heads; their facial expressions are exaggerated in comic-book fashion.
In 1192 Minamoto no Yoritomo established the Bakufu in Kamakura. In contrast to the nobility, the warrior rulers were supposed to be serious-minded, and the aesthetic terms wabi, sabi and yugen came into use. Certainly the monochrome brush paintings of the period reflect this restraint, but the Zen painter-priests, though following Chinese originals, yet introduced a distinct comical impressionism. Mincho, who preceded the Sesson mentioned above, copied a famous painting of a Taoist Immortal, Li Tieguai, but he boldly and ingeniously interpreted it in his own way, ignoring the metaphysical world of the Taoist mysteries.
A type of portrait painting called nise-e, 'likeness picture', was in vogue among the nobility in the Kamakura period. These were based on direct sketches of the subjects (one example showed the cavalry of the imperial guard), and in contrast to idealized portraits they are bordering on caricatures in their accentuation of features -- round or elongated faces, high or flat noses, small or large mouths.We may say that this was a tradition inherited by ukiyoe artists such as Sharaku. The same period saw the rise of illustrations of popular themes. The scroll Hyakki Yako Emaki, 'The Nightly Parade of 100 Demons', contains some fifty types of ghosts and goblins, most of them metamorphosed images of utensils or instruments such as umbrellas, kettles, zithers and lutes.
In the Momoyama period of the latter half of the 16th century, when every field of art was mobilized to embellish the castles and temples of those in power, the decorative arts developed an unprecedented spirit of liveliness. The great decorator Hasegawa Tohaku was an admirer of Muxi, and his Withered Trees and Gibbons is evidently an echo of Muxi's gibbons seen in the triptych at the Daitokuji in Kyoto; nevertheless, his frolicking gibbons exhibit the same contrast with Muxi's work as does Sesson's tiger. The military commanders of this period delighted in costumes and armour with outlandish designs, such as a surcoat with crossed sickles on a scarlet wool ground. There were many helmets with unconventional designs, called kawari kabuto; one was in the form of a precipitous cliff; another of a clenched fist, and another, made of leather, was in the shape of a monkey's head.
This was also the period of ceramics designed for the tea ceremony, and Japanese-produced ceramics often had flaws which developed in the process of firing. Such defects came to be perceived as part of the design, and tea masters began to find beauty in cracked or distorted wares. One example shown was of a water jar nicknamed Yabure Bukuro (Torn Sack), and another was the Kutsugata Chawan (Shoe-shaped Tea Bowl), an irregularly curved black tea bowl said to have got its name from its resemblance to footwear worn by the Heian aristocracy.The decorative artist Tawaraya Sotatsu was active at the time when such strange designs were in vogue, and produced painted panels for the Yogen'in in Kyoto with pictures of Chinese lions and an elephant. The lions produced by this plebeian artist have a bouncy, puppy-like quality that makes them more lovable than those produced by the Kano school; the design of the elephant, in contrast, verges on the abstract in its bold elliptical lines.
With little time remaining, Prof. Tsuji came at last to the Edo period. Although the country was sealed off, influences were still coming in from China, and the production of netsuke owed a lot to Ming and Qing techniques. There was, however, a touch of humour added to the designs, and one example shown was of a "Bashful Monkey" with one paw covering his private parts. Almost every field of Edo period art had some involvement with play and amusement, and to two forms of this he gave the names 'parody' and 'trick painting' or 'illusionism'. One favourite target for parody was the scene of the Buddha's passing into Nirvana, surrounded by grieving disciples and birds and animals. A parody by Ito Jakuchu substitutes fruit and vegetables for these figures, perhaps because he was the son of a greengrocer. One form of 'illusionism' was the depiction of objects in 'close-up', larger than their natural size, so as to surprise the viewers. A pair of screen paintings, Bull and Elephant, by Nagasawa Rosetsu have the animals occupying the whole area of the screens, with tiny objects, a white mouse and black crows respectively, juxtaposed.
One illusionary aspect of European art was the portrayal of imaginary animals as if they were real, and Dutch picture books of this kind found their way to Japan. Hokusai was greatly attracted by them and drew upon them for his illustrations, adding his own imaginative ideas. Kuniyoshi reproduced these illustrations, enlarging them into triptych woodblock prints with grotesque figures of giant fish and ghosts.
At this point Prof. Tsuji looked at his watch and decided that he had no time left to present his conclusions. In his prepared script, however, he had said that this element of playfulness, which existed as an essential component of Japanese art to the same extent as seriousness, could still be found today, as was suggested by the popularity of comic books and animated cartoons. Critics deplored this phenomenon as revealing a decline in intellectual maturity among the younger generation, but he himself was inclined to see it as following the thousand-year traditional love of comic art.
No time was left for questions, and the meeting was brought to a swift conclusion with a warm vote of thanks expeditiously presented by Dr. Ciaran Murray.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 7", September 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
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