Engaged with Traditional Japanese Art

Art that renews Japanese painting, printmaking, calligraphy, ceramics and craft traditions.

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About

Japanese artists have repeatedly renewed their traditions by looking back at them. In the early 19th century Sakai Hōitsu revived the bold gold-ground manner of Ogata Kōrin a century after his death, so that Rinpa survived as a lineage of admirers rather than a workshop. After Japan opened to the West, the Nihonga movement of the Meiji era, championed by Okakura Kakuzō and painters such as Yokoyama Taikan, defended mineral pigments, silk and ink against oil painting.

Prints and crafts followed. The publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō launched shin-hanga in the 1910s, and Itō Shinsui's women at their toilette updated the ukiyo-e beauty print. The Mingei folk-craft movement, led from the 1920s by Yanagi Sōetsu with potters such as Hamada Shōji, prized humble everyday wares. After the war Morita Shiryū pushed calligraphy towards abstraction, and around 2000 Takashi Murakami's Superflat linked anime to the flat, decorative compositions of Edo painting.