Japanese art in perspective: East-West encounters

Japanese art in perspective: East-West encounters marks the second English translation by Matt Treyvaud from the rich oeuvre of renowned Japanese Art Historian Takashina Shūji. Like its predecessor The Japanese Sense of Beauty, the work in question is a collection of essays that offers a rich tableau on the mutual and fruitful artistic encounters between Japan and the West. The book comprises Takashina’s essayistic work of 15 years into three parts, each of which offers a different perspective on various issues regarding the titular east-west encounters.

The first part starts by pinpointing the unique facets of Japanese aesthetics. In particular, the notions of the aesthetic of negation (17) and the aesthetic of conveying the whole with [a] fragment (57) set the focus for the following analyses. The former aesthetic can be identified in the cutting-out of all unnecessary elements like in Sakai Hōitsu’s Flowering Plants of Summer and Autumn, while the latter aesthetic is typified in the trailing bough motif that can be traced from Ogata Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms all the way to Monet’s Water Lilies. Takashina identifies the Essays in Idleness as “the birth of awareness of the beauty of the imperfect, the incomplete, even the abandoned” (13). In this way, the Japanese concept of beauty has far surpassed notions of something that is only attuned to the adorable, pure or detailed by further encompassing beauty “as a part of the world of feeling the subject evokes” (13), while at the same time “the framing of the work always suggests something beyond it” (22). As Takashina notes, aesthetic practices like painting, printing, calligraphy and even architecture have existed in “the general absence of a concept of isolated ‘work of art‘ as such” (25). This stands in stark contrast to Western aesthetics of art, which is why Japanese forms of seeing should be understood from a philosophy of form that arose from a tendency to regard shapes as more essential to the aesthetic experience than things themselves – as one might obverse in the ceremonial rebuilding of Ise Shrine (33, 43). In regard to their influence on Western art, Takashina states that the genre of ukiyo-e spurred a change that was ready to happen within Western art (47). Furthermore, Takashina points out that the story of Sen no Rikyū’s morning glory as well as Ogata Kōrin’s Irises and Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees could be understood as paradigmatic for “a principle of simplification in which whatever is not necessary is cut away” (79). “By boldly leaving vast swathes of white space untouched, they attained a supreme profundity” (83). This also works towards a principle of ornamentation as part of an “aesthetic of close-up” (84) like in Ogata Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms.

After these deep dives into aesthetic theory, the second part takes a more historical focus, namely in summarizing how the Meiji restauration left its mark on the development of Western style art in Japan. First, it deals with the detailed trajectory of Japanese reform in the fine arts during the Meiji period as well as a series of avant-garde movements. Afterwards, it tackles the ambiguous term japonisme, making use of art curator Geneviève Lacambre’s four key stages of reception by one culture of another – discover, adopt, assimilate, and create (124) – before meticulously verifying the influence of Japanese art on artists like Manet and Monet. As Takashina poignantly notes: “Nothing can bear fruit unless the recipient is prepared for its arrival” (132). It is therefore particularly interesting to notice how Western art in the early Meiji period was mostly understood as “a technology rather than an art form” (90), namely for realistic pictorial reproduction (92), whereas the artists of the West found their new aesthetics incarnated in Hokusai, Hiroshige and others: “Intriguingly, both the bright colors of the Impressionists and the bird’s-eye view of Gauguin and the Nabis were largely inspired by ukiyo-e prints and other Japanese art” (101). However, there was also an avant-garde establishing itself in Japan; in a counter-movement to the “Copybook-ism” (118) of Japanese Academism, their work marked a shift towards a poetry of the self, a “lyrical abstraction” (112), so to speak, that, according to Takashina, was still very much attuned and connected to a sense of beauty that has existed in Japan since ancient times (108, 113).

The third and final part of the book highlights two unique characteristics of Japanese art. First, there is the depiction of the transition of the four seasons in a single image. This aesthetics of transition is poignantly embodied in the writings of Sei Shonagon and Matsuo Bashō but also in Sesshū’s landscape paintings. Appreciation for the beauty of change becomes evident as a common thread throughout all genres of Japanese art. To put in it in the author’s words: “To see a world of beauty in petals even as they scatter and fall is a uniquely Japanese sentiment, nurtured by the cycle of seasons” (153). Second, there is also the concurrent use of images and words in the same picture which offers a kind of synesthetic intertextuality to the spectators. Whereas in the West images and words have belonged to utterly separate worlds, they have always been interwoven in the East. In the West, according to Takashina’s reading of Michel Foucault, that has only changed with the works of René Magritte, but it has always been a stable of Japanese artistry, which could be deduced from how printing developed differently in the East and West (155–157). Particularly noteworthy are the author’s examples for this particular artistic characteristic: Of course, there are scrolls and paintings like Hon’ami Kōetsu and Tawaraya Sōtatsu’s Crane Scroll (169) or Hokusai’s “Kisen Hōshi” in Six Poetic Immortals (159), but also items of everyday use incorporate these characteristics, for instance lacquerware items like the “Hatsune maki-e-tebako” or “Funabashi maki-e-suzuribako,” and also the card game Hyakunin isshu (159f., 169). For Takashina, this not only points toward a cultural climate in which creator and viewer shared a knowledge of classical literature that even reached the common folk during the Edo period, but it also offers a glimpse into how the aforementioned aesthetic principles find themselves anywhere in Japanese art practices. For example, the aesthetic of conveying the whole with a fragment also shows itself in the fact that poems are rarely quoted in their entirety, because if familiarity with the classics could be assumed among viewers, then there was no need to write out the entire text. Therefore, such works might be considered “a manifestation of the distinctly Japanese capacity for creating beauty where aesthetic expression meets everyday life” (86).

Altogether, the book offers precisely what is written on its cover, namely a profound insight into “an exchange of ideas in the truest sense – and one of a most fertile and productive nature” (134), and it does so in a most poignant and stimulating manner. It not only explains its theoretical framework in a precise way, but also offers with it many noteworthy background stories and examples from the history of art. Particularly interesting to a Western reader might be the many embodiments of Japanese aesthetic principles in the modern art of the West. From this perspective, there are many interesting points of exploration where Eastern and Western aesthetics inspired each other in a roundabout way. When Takashina points out that Japanese pictures are “flat”, not because of the painters’ lack of realism but because they choose to roam freely rather than employing a fixed perspective (17), this could also shed an interesting light on how to interpret “flat” manners of painting that have developed through the influence of japonisme. Considering that modern aesthetic theories have surfaced in response to these unfamiliar modes of artistic expression, it could be worthwhile to look for similarities between Eastern and Western ways of constructing aesthetic theories. Takashina has already mentioned Foucault in this regard, but there could also be points of resonance with Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, which suggests that the framing of a work always hints toward something beyond the frame. Of course, all these mentioned manners of aesthetic representation (i.e. negation, fragmentation, ornamentation, etc.) are not necessarily clear cut; they seem to be more like specific moments of experience that are connected or interwoven with each other to create a deep texture that permeates every part of the culture in question. In this way, Takashina’s essays invite us to follow him as he explores the intertwined aesthetic roots of crosscultural artistic interaction across time and space.

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Philippe Bürgin

Philippe Bürgin is a doctoral student in the field of Aesthetics at the State University of Fine Arts Stuttgart since 2022. The main focus of his doctoral thesis is set on the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime as a systematic paradigm of aesthetic experiences. His research interests are centered on Transcultural and Everyday Aesthetics, Philosophy of Culture, Critical Theory and History of Ideas.