Screen Format

About

Screens are furniture and pictures at once. In China, standing and folding screens were used to frame a seat of honour or shield a room, and paintings of scholars often show one behind the host. Screens reached Japan by the 8th century, where they became a major field for painting: byōbu, folding screens usually made in pairs of six panels, and fusuma, sliding doors, decorated temples, castles and residences.

Japanese artists made the most of the zigzag. Kanō school painters covered castle rooms with gold-leaf grounds, pines and tigers in the late 16th century. Tawaraya Sōtatsu's Wind God and Thunder God (early 17th century) pushes its deities to the outer corners of a pair of two-panel screens, and Ogata Kōrin's Irises (c. 1701–05) repeats clumps of flowers across the folds. At the Joseon court, Korean painters made screens of the sun, moon and five peaks, and of books.