Echoes of Modernism and Postmodernism

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One of the things that particularly attracted by interest to Japanese art in the first place was that it made me rethink what I had learned about Western art. We are familiar with the patterns of development that Europe followed, and might even claim that these are presented as if they are almost inevitable. Maybe it was just me thinking so narrowly, but it took seeing a different pattern of development to make me question that.

This is not an attempt to argue that Japan is superior through having come up with some Modernist or Postmodernist ideas long before the West did. They didn't. They simply followed a different path, but it did involve some very different ideas and assumptions, and some strange things making appearances surprisingly early, which I think is interesting in itself and as a contrast with the West.

I'm going to do a whole route on the subject of Japanese attitudes to realism, so won't include that here. I will note here that they didn't have a modern revolt against realism, because they never adopted it as a key goal or style in the first place.

Accidents

The most unusual thing in old Japanese art, to Western eyes, might well be its positive keenness on accidents, something that Western artists, at least until well into the 20th Century, tried to totally avoid. This is not entirely Japanese in origin - here is Tsuji on 8thC Chinese artists Wang Mo and Zhang Zhihe: they "would spread out large pieces of silk and paint. Splashing ink on the silk, they would laugh, sing or dance while painting... It is also recorded that people would sit on top of splashed ink and colour and be pulled about." This is around 1200 years before Yves Klein pulled models around on paint and canvas. 'Flung ink' was adopted in Japan, at least allegedly and in theory - I am unconvinced that much accident was allowed.

If the Japanese were less wild than China in this painting approach, they went further in the area of ceramics. Slip is not easy to control tightly, and micro-explosions within kilns can (if they don't wreck the pieces) leave marks and flaws of various kinds. The Chinese were inclined to throw away pots that suffered so, seeking a smooth perfection, whereas for the Japanese this was a bonus, something to be embraced and treasured. This dates back to at least the Nara period (8th Century).

Gesture

Again in the west, the brushwork of painters aimed at invisibility until the Impressionists in the latter part of the 19th Century. The Japanese aesthetic always centred around the linework, so seeing the very direct effects of the brush was more or less the norm. The gestural - arguably emerging in the West only with expressionism, or more fully even abstract expressionism - was therefore always a major part of Japanese art. You expect to be able to picture how ink was applied in Zen art; some sculpture deliberately left the chisel marks visible; and there was nothing wrong with a thumb-mark in slip on ceramic items. Zen painting and calligraphy in particular are almost impossible to see without consciousness of the movements of the artist, in much the same way as a Pollock painting. The sense of the art as the traces of the artist's character, as a very direct and readable expression of that, is a commonplace in Japan.

Crudity

A popular conception of Japan is one of delicate refinement, but a lot of Japanese art is not so much deliberately crude as not seeking any kind of subtlety or polish. Simplicity and directness and naturalness are valued parts of Zen aesthetics in particular, and this can be seen in the often basic cartoony style of monastic Zen art, and in the most valued tea ceremony ceramics, which look very rustic, particularly Raku and Oribe ware.

Playfulness

There is also a playfulness, a ludic impulse, in much Japanese art that we mostly associate with Postmodernism in the West (though we could more accurately draw parallels with Sterne, I think). This could include: the satirical pranking of Ogata Korin in the 17th Century; Hokusai's stunts two hundred years ago, the humour mixed into paintings by Zen monks of even their most revered religious figures, such as Daruma and Hotei; the making of lacquer to imitate other materials by such as Haritsu; or the extraordinary fake cracks and repairs by Zeshin in the 19th Century.

Hierarchy of Arts

Another thing that Postmodernism has brought in the West is a crumbling of the tendency to take for granted a steep hierarchy of the worth of artforms - painting and poetry at the top, sliding all the way down to comic books and manufactured pop music at the bottom - and the clear division between art and craft, which was a relatively recent idea even in the West. These hierarchies exist in Japan too - prints weren't very highly valued, but there were printmakers who felt that kabuki theatre was beneath them, and would not depict it - but they are different and shallower, and the art/craft distinction hardly existed until Western influence began to dominate in the 20th Century. In Japan, the top arts have long been calligraphy, poetry and painting, but the gap in respectability between these and comics, lacquerwork, ceramics, flower arranging or whatever is much smaller. I intend to extend this subject into its own thematic route in the future.

Miscellaneous

A few other brief notes: collage combining torn paper and painting was in common use from at least the 12th Century, as a ground for calligraphy; raked sand cones at the Daisen-in temple from early in the 16th Century look like minimal art, or perhaps land art; the 17th C Katsura Imperial Villa was inspirational for the Bauhaus, Mondrian and others; Ito Jakuchu in the 18th Century produced bizarre mosaic-style paintings, a divisionism not unlike that of Seurat a hundred years later; poems were sometimes calligraphed in the Muromachi period (14th-16th Century) with the lines in random order, for the reader to reconstruct as they wished (this was called maze writing).