Some of the best-known examples of Ukiyo-e, the popular and influential Japanese genre exemplified by Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” depict notable locations in a stylized yet essentially realistic manner. But not all of Hokusai’s peers portrayed Japan, or even any actual place or person, literally. There was also an appetite for fantasy, as two fascinating shows at the National Museum of Asian Art demonstrate.
“Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680-1980” mostly features painted screens and scrolls. Many are from the Edo period (1603-1868), when international travel was forbidden by the shogunate. Artists who portrayed China modeled their pictures on Chinese precursors, and even on specific artworks. Indeed, it might be said that these Japanese painters were not just imagining China, but also imagining themselves as Chinese.
Made in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the pictures in “Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints” visit even more fanciful territory. But these images of ghosts, demons and shape-shifting animal spirits are grounded in a sort of reality: They’re based on scenes from Kabuki and Noh theater.
China was the source of much Japanese culture, including its writing system. It was also the conduit for practices, notably Buddhism, that developed even farther away. So it’s hardly surprising that some Japanese artists would emulate the Chinese aristocrats, known as literati, whose careers often combined painting, poetry and government service.
Literati pictures were principally black and white, rendered with brushed ink and sometimes enhanced with subtle touches of color. So are most of the paintings in “Imagined Neighbors.”
When Edo-period Japanese artists imitated Chinese landscapes, they weren’t copying pictures of places they could never see for themselves. They were reimagining scenes that were fantasies to begin with. That’s because Chinese paintings were not documentary illustrations. They depicted idealized locations, typically dramatic mountain-scapes, that dwarf a few human figures, usually travelers or recluses.
This is just the kind of vertiginous terrain seen here in works by such 19th-century Japanese artists as Ike Taiga, Yosa Buson and Noro Kaiseki. Even when emulating Chinese painting, however, the Japanese artists might add kinetic elements characteristic of Edo-period prints, such as the white slashes that represent a torrential downpour in Tanomura Chikuden’s “Crossing a River in Wind and Rain.” These are painters from the same time and place, after all, that produced Hokusai’s dynamically coiled wave.
“Imagined Neighbors” includes two examples of calligraphy from the latter half of the 20th century, but most of the pieces were made before Japan’s cataclysmic 1931 invasion of Manchuria. For just a few decades before that, some Japanese artists were able to visit China, where they explored the sort of landscapes their predecessors could only dream of. Others stayed in Japan but painted such exemplary Chinese subjects as “Peony Garden,” rendered by Murakami Kagaku in 1918 with bold reds and pinks. Chinese culture still loomed over Japan, but the austerity of literati painting had bloomed into something brighter.
There’s also lots of red in “Staging the Supernatural,” but it’s employed for gorier ends. Monsters, skeletons and severed heads are among the subjects of the Kabuki half of the show, which consists of woodblock prints and illustrated books by nearly a dozen Edo-period artists. The Japanese folk tales that became Kabuki plays are often about the vengeful spirits of wronged women, so many of the pictures feature female ghosts whose bodies drip blood, dwindle into plumes of mist or fuse with those of animals. In one ominous scene, four figures stand in front of the giant gray face of a cat demon.
The brashly colored prints, which often pit red against green, are gruesome yet gleeful. They exalt not murder and revenge, but imagination. Traditionally, Kabuki ghost plays were staged in August, so their frights could send chills through viewers stewing in Japan’s muggy summers. The theatrical themes reflected primal fears but weren’t to be taken all that seriously.
The show’s other section is devoted to Noh, considered more refined than Kabuki, and to a single artist: Tsukioka Kōgyo, who was born the year after the Edo period ended. His approach shows more Western influence, and the artisans who printed his work crafted subtler hues. The results are lovely and elegant, and thus apt for the statelier Noh theater.
Japanese audiences would have understood that the Kabuki prints represented performances, but Kōgyo went further to demonstrate the theatricality of his vignettes. The pictures of ghosts, spider people and fox spirits occasionally depict the stage beneath the performers, or even reveal some backstage business. In both their subjects and style, Kōgyo’s prints celebrate artifice.
The works in “Imagined Neighbors” are all from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection, recently given to the museum. Most of the prints in “Staging the Supernatural” are also relatively recent gifts from the holdings of Robert O. Muller or Pearl and Seymour Moskowitz. All five Japanese art enthusiasts specialize in items that weren’t acquired by Charles Lang Freer, whose collection was the genesis of the museum. Freer covered a lot of territory, but these shows reveal that he left many worlds to explore.
If you go
Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680-1980
Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu. 202-633-1000.
Dates: Through Sept. 15.
Prices: Free.
Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu. 202-633-1000.
Dates: Through Oct. 6.
Prices: Free.
