Magazine: Winter 2018

For more than a millenium, Japanese painters, printmakers, and more recently, photographers have produced images of outdoor scenes—large or small, colorful or monochromatic, intimate or expansive, actual locations or imagined. Two [objects] stand out as a pair of opposites that encapsulate some of the ideas and pictorial effects that Japanese artists have expressed through the rendering of place: Tani Bunchō’s Mountains and Water and Utagawa Hiroshige’s Moon Pine at Ueno. The difference between them in format and scale immediately sets up the contrast. Bunchō’s pair of six-fold screens commands attention. [...] It spans about twenty feet, and the folds create a physical dimensionality that gives the painting tangible depth and sculptural presence. What a viewer sees changes according to viewing position: moving in close to see details hides other parts of the painting behind the folds; moving back allows one to take in the whole image and envelops the viewer in its deep and wide waterscape. In contrast, Hiroshige’s image fills only a single sheet of paper, its small size inviting close-up inspection. Within the vertical confines of the rectangular page, the artist encourages even closer looking with an extraordinary circular tree branch that emphatically frames a cluster of buildings in the distance. Their means of manufacture vary, too, each celebrating a different kind of picture making. To delineate the rocks, trees, and mountains that bound a great body of water— mostly the gold-leafed ground left in reserve—Bunchō wielded a flexible brush loaded with liquid black ink. This approach records every twist and turn of the brush in Bunchō’s hand, his energy revealed in the taut, controlled fluidity of the ink lines. Conversely, Hiroshige never touched the printed paper that bears his name. He designed the image in the form a drawing, which was then translated into print by expert craftsmen—woodblock carvers and printers—to produce the multiple copies of the final picture we enjoy today. This technique emphasizes crisply defined, hard-edge forms and a panoply of colors, which render Hiroshige’s dramatic design with clarity and a visual power that belies the print’s small size. [T]he contrast of pictures of real places with those that existed only in the imagination, is also exemplified by these two works—though which is which may defy initial expectations. Nothing in Bunchō’s view of a mountainous watery location, with people leisurely boating, seems beyond the realm of the possible. Could this not be a tranquil place that Bunchō visited and captured with his brush and ink? In fact, the painting is an invention of Bunchō’s creative mind and knowledge of earlier art. For its period audience, it evoked not Japan but China (to which Bunchō never traveled), and his audience appreciated it for its persuasive creation of an idealized remote retreat. Hiroshige’s picture, on the other hand, seems implausible. What tree has a circular branch like the one portrayed in this print? And yet, this was a real tree in a real place, the so-called “Moon Pine” in the district of Ueno in Edo (present-day Tokyo). The preciseness of place and name of the renowned tree is recorded and emphasized in the printed words in the cartouches at the upper right. The tree blew down in a typhoon in the late nineteenth century but has been recreated recently (if imperfectly) at the same location. -- Andrew M. Watsky Professor of Japanese Art and Archaeology and Director, P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art