Nanga (Japanese painting)

Nanga, also known as the southern school, was a confederation of Japanese ink painters that experienced a significant century-long period of influence during the nearly three centuries of the Edo Period, a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Japan enjoyed an unprecedented era of political stability, border security, economic prosperity, and social order. It was, however, a tight, closed society; a countermovement against that sense of cultural isolationism was at the heart of the Nanga movement. Although Western influences were entirely absent during the Edo period, Chinese culture was far easier to import, mostly through the bustling seaport cities, most notably Nagasaki. Drawing on models of Chinese art and poetry, most of them from nearly two centuries earlier, the artists of the Nanga school consciously strove to imitate both the techniques and the subject matter of that Chinese movement and, in doing so, to direct Japanese art into a significant new direction.

Background

During the latter part of the fifteenth century, Chinese landscape painting, by far the defining genre of visual art at the time, was divided consciously into two schools, by social status and training. The lines were clearly drawn, separating Chinese art into northern and southern schools. The northern school was composed of the more affluent painters. They were academically trained in the careful drawing techniques of forced perspective; they would seldom observe their subjects carefully, most often flowers and birds, but rather would strive to recreate with careful diligence an abstract and idealized version of the shape and lines of their subjects. Their works, deliberately uniform in their look, were sought after and purchased by wealthy merchants as well as by the court of the emperor as an indication of taste and affluence. The southern school, by contrast, were free spirits. Disdaining the restrictions of academic techniques, they sought to mimic the rhythms and movements of the natural world itself. They replaced classroom instruction with observation. Their works were animated, expressive, and individual.

These southern works, not highly valued by the Chinese market, found readier acceptance in Japan. Imported by the Japanese long after they were produced, not only by sea trade but also by itinerant travelers, many of them merchants and monks, the works of the southern school were appreciated for their immediacy and an energy considered lacking in the northern school’s far more expensive works. This cultural flow from the Chinese mainland had a remarkable impact on Japanese artists, who themselves faced a similar schism between academically trained painters and those who pursued more individual expression. However, the Chinese model was skewed as it was assimilated into Japanese culture. The artists of the southern school in Japan, the Nanga, were intellectuals, amateur poets and freethinking philosophers, social misfits, but they sought in painting a source of income. Because the Chinese model they imported valued painting as an individual expression that did not require lengthy (and expensive) training, they studied and copied the relatively imitable southern school works. They brought to their own efforts an undisciplined and individual style that, in turn, they marketed to merchants, entrepreneurs, shop owners, even farmers. Art, they argued, did not belong only in temples and in palaces.

Overview

The signature works of the Nanga school were created principally on nontraditional media, that is, not on canvas but rather on scrolls, fans, ornamental silk screens, room dividers, even sliding doors. They were perceived to be functional, designed to find a place in homes and even business places. The subject matter, as with the Chinese models they imitated, was drawn from nature—mountains, birds, flowers, trees—not as they appear to the eye but rather as they were perceived by the artist. The Nanga school did not value verisimilitude or even realism. The style was rough, the brush work slashing. The screens are stroked with lines, often executed in heavy brush strokes, layered one on top of another. Although infrequently the paintings provided poetic texts to complement the images, executed in elegant calligraphy, the works were largely pure image.

Nanga art used primarily black ink with touches of incidental color. The result is a kind of austerity, a coolness. These artists were self-described intellectuals consciously imitating not nature but rather works of art they admired, artists who therefore tended to disdain emotions as plebian, even misguided in art. They studied art not nature. Their spare monochromatic presentation further endowed the works with a cerebral sterility. These are the works of painters who were engaged in the craft of painting.

Because they lacked the sophisticated technical training of the academic artists, the Nanga painters tended to be perceived as crude in their execution. In response, they celebrated their art as the expression of an individual rather than as a cookie-cutter replication of classically defined models—an ironic assertion, given their indebtedness to Chinese art. They endowed their natural objects—bamboo, orchids, birds, waves, mountain peaks—with spiritual, allegorical layerings that meant much to them. Each work represented less a snapshot of the world and more a moment in their spiritual and intellectual journey. The principal artists of the era—Ike no Taiga (1723–1776), Yosa Buson (1716–1783), and Go Sun (1753–1811)—centered the movement in and around the cities of Kyoto and Osaka and brought to those thriving ports a sense of artistic and cultural identity.

Within contemporary art markets, the works of the Nanga period are frequently criticized as being at best derivative, at worst technically inept, amateurish. But, with their spiritual element, their austere style, their fusion of cultural idioms, and their animated individual technique, they have maintained a secure place within the development of Japanese art of the early modern period.

Bibliography

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Cahill, James. Scholar Painters of Japan: The Nagan School. New York: Ayer, 1979. Print.

Chiba, Reiko, and Shutei Ota. A Copybook for Japanese Poetry. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 2012. Print.

Fischer, Felice, and Kyoko Kinoshinta. Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokurani: Japanese Masters of the Brush. Philadephia: Philadelphia Museum of Art P, 2007. Print.

Izzard, Sebastian. Nanga: Japanese Literati Paintings. New York: Sebastian Izzard Asian Art P, 2005. Print.

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Rosenfield, John M. Extraordinary Persons: Works by Eccentric, Non-Conformist Japanese at the Early Modern Era (1580–1868). Cambridge: Harvard Art P, 1999. Print.

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