Japanese art | History, Characteristics, & Facts (2024)

Japanese art, the painting, calligraphy, architecture, pottery, sculpture, bronzes, jade carving, and other fine or decorative visual arts produced in Japan over the centuries.

General characteristics

The study of Japanese art has frequently been complicated by the definitions and expectations established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japan was opened to the West. The occasion of dramatically increased interaction with other cultures seemed to require a convenient summary of Japanese aesthetic principles, and Japanese art historians and archaeologists began to construct methodologies to categorize and assess a vast body of material ranging from Neolithic pottery to wood-block prints. Formulated in part from contemporary scholarly assessments and in part from the syntheses of enthusiastic generalists, these theories on the characteristics of Japanese culture and, more specifically, Japanese art not unexpectedly bore the prejudices and tastes of the times. There was, for example, a tendency to cast the court art of the Heian period (794–1185) as the apex of Japanese artistic achievement. The aesthetic preference for refinement, for images subtly imbued with metaphoric meaning, reflected the sublimely nuanced court mores that permitted only oblique reference to emotion and valued suggestion over bold declaration. Existing in tandem with the canonization of the Heian court aesthetic was the notion that the aesthetic sensibilities surrounding the tea ceremony were quintessentially Japanese. This communal ritual, developed in the 16th century, emphasized the hyperconscious juxtaposition of found and finely crafted objects in an exercise intended to lead to subtle epiphanies of insight. It further highlighted the central role of indirection and understatement in the Japanese visual aesthetic.

One of the most important proselytizers of Japanese culture in the West was Okakura Kakuzō. As curator of Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he expounded the mysteries of Asian art and culture to appreciative Boston Brahmins. As the author of such works as The Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906), he reached an even wider audience eager to find an antidote to the clanging steel and belching smokestacks of Western modernity. Japan—and, writ large, Asia—was understood as a potential source of spiritual renewal for the West. There was an ironic counterpoint to Okakura’s lessons when a thoroughly modern Japanese navy made mincemeat of the proud Russian fleet steaming through the Tsushima Strait in the climactic moment of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). This surprisingly bellicose Japan was clearly more than tea and gossamer, and it seemed that perhaps an overly selective definition of Japanese arts and culture might have excluded useful hints of violence, passion, and deeply influential strains of heterodoxy.

At the opening of the 21st century, superficial impressions of Japan still fostered a nagging schizophrenic image combining the polar characteristics of elegant refinement and economic prowess. The pitfalls of oversimplification have been noted above, however, and a century of scholarship, both Japanese and Western, has provided ample evidence of a heritage of visual expression that is as utterly complex and varied as the wider culture that produced it. Nevertheless, within the diversity discernible patterns and inclinations can be recognized and characterized as Japanese.

Most Japanese art bears the mark of extensive interaction with or reaction to outside forces. Buddhism, which originated in India and developed throughout Asia, was the most persistent vehicle of influence. It provided Japan with an already well-established iconography and also offered perspectives on the relationship between the visual arts and spiritual development. Notable influxes of Buddhism from Korea occurred in the 6th and 7th centuries. The Chinese Tang international style was the focal point of Japanese artistic development in the 8th century, while the iconographies of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism were highly influential from the 9th century. Major immigrations of Chinese Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist monks in the 13th and 14th centuries and, to a lesser degree, in the 17th century placed indelible marks on Japanese visual culture. These periods of impact and assimilation brought not only religious iconography but also vast and largely undigested features of Chinese culture. Whole structures of cultural expression, ranging from a writing system to political structures, were presented to the Japanese.

Various theories have thus been posited which describe the development of Japanese culture and, in particular, visual culture as a cyclical pattern of assimilation, adaptation, and reaction. The reactive feature is sometimes used to describe periods in which the most obviously unique and indigenous characteristics of Japanese art flourish. For example, during the 10th and 11th centuries of the Heian period, when, for political reasons, extensive contact with China ceased, there was consolidation and extensive development of distinctive Japanese painting and writing styles. Similarly, the vast influence of Chinese Zen aesthetic that marked the culture of the Muromachi period (1338–1573)—typified by the taste for ink monochrome painting—was eclipsed at the dawn of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) by boldly colourful genre and decorative painting that celebrated the blossoming native culture of the newly united nation. The notion of cyclical assimilation and then assertion of independence requires extensive nuancing, however. It should be recognized that, while there were periods in which either continental or indigenous art forms were dominant, usually the two forms coexisted.

Another pervasive characteristic of Japanese art is an understanding of the natural world as a source of spiritual insight and an instructive mirror of human emotion. An indigenous religious sensibility that long preceded Buddhism perceived that a spiritual realm was manifest in nature (see Shinto). Rock outcroppings, waterfalls, and gnarled old trees were viewed as the abodes of spirits and were understood as their personification. This belief system endowed much of nature with numinous qualities. It nurtured, in turn, a sense of proximity to and intimacy with the world of spirit as well as a trust in nature’s general benevolence. The cycle of the seasons was deeply instructive and revealed, for example, that immutability and transcendent perfection were not natural norms. Everything was understood as subject to a cycle of birth, fruition, death, and decay. Imported Buddhist notions of transience were thus merged with the indigenous tendency to seek instruction from nature.

Attentive proximity to nature developed and reinforced an aesthetic that generally avoided artifice. In the production of works of art, the natural qualities of constitutive materials were given special prominence and understood as integral to whatever total meaning a work professed. When, for example, Japanese Buddhist sculpture of the 9th century moved from the stucco or bronze Tang models and turned for a time to natural, unpolychromed woods, already ancient iconographic forms were melded with a preexisting and multileveled respect for wood.

Union with the natural was also an element of Japanese architecture. Architecture seemed to conform to nature. The symmetry of Chinese-style temple plans gave way to asymmetrical layouts that followed the specific contours of hilly and mountainous topography. The borders existing between structures and the natural world were deliberately obscure. Elements such as long verandas and multiple sliding panels offered constant vistas on nature—although the nature was often carefully arranged and fabricated rather than wild and real.

The perfectly formed work of art or architecture, unweathered and pristine, was ultimately considered distant, cold, and even grotesque. This sensibility was also apparent in tendencies of Japanese religious iconography. The ordered hierarchical sacred cosmology of the Buddhist world generally inherited from China bore the features of China’s earthly imperial court system. While some of those features were retained in Japanese adaptation, there was also a concurrent and irrepressible trend toward creating easily approachable deities. This usually meant the elevation of ancillary deities such as ji*zō Bosatsu (Sanskrit: Ksh*tigarbha bodhisattva) or Kannon Bosatsu (Avalokiteshvara) to levels of increased cult devotion. The inherent compassion of supreme deities was expressed through these figures and their iconography.

The interaction of the spiritual and natural world was also delightfully expressed in the many narrative scroll paintings produced in the medieval period. Stories of temple foundings and biographies of sainted founders were replete with episodes describing both heavenly and demonic forces roaming the earth and interacting with the populace on a human scale. There was a marked tendency toward the comfortable domestication of the supernatural. The sharp distinction between good and evil was gently reduced, and otherworldly beings took on characteristics of human ambiguity that granted them a level of approachability, prosaically flawing the perfect of either extreme.

Even more obviously decorative works such as the brightly polychromed overglaze enamels popular from the 17th century selected the preponderance of their surface imagery from the natural world. The repeated patterns found on surfaces of textiles, ceramics, and lacquerware are usually carefully worked abstractions of natural forms such as waves or pine needles. In many cases pattern, as a kind of hint or suggestion of molecular substructure, is preferred to carefully rendered realism.

The everyday world of human endeavour has been carefully observed by Japanese artists. For example, the human figure in a multiplicity of mundane poses was memorably recorded by the print artist Hokusai (1760–1849). The quirky and humorous seldom eluded the view of the many anonymous creators of medieval hand scrolls or 17th-century genre screen paintings. Blood and gore, whether in battle or criminal mayhem, were vigorously recorded as undeniable aspects of the human. Similarly, the sensual and erotic were rendered in delightful and uncensorious ways. The reverence and curiosity about the natural extended from botany to every dimension of human activity.

In summary, the range of Japanese visual art is extensive, and some elements seem truly antithetical. An illuminated sutra manuscript of the 12th century and a macabre scene of seppuku (ritual disembowelment) rendered by the 19th-century print artist Tsukioka Yosh*toshi can be forced into a common aesthetic only in the most artificial way. The viewer is thus advised to expect a startling range of diversity. Yet, within that diverse body of expression, certain characteristic elements seem to be recurrent: art that is aggressively assimilative, a profound respect for nature as a model, a decided preference for delight over dogmatic assertion in the description of phenomena, a tendency to give compassion and human scale to religious iconography, and an affection for materials as important vehicles of meaning.