Asian Art Korea Japan

Okay, welcome back. So we're going to have a short little lecture on Korea and Japan. I apologize for the abbreviated natures of these lectures, but I do want to get to Islam. We'll probably be giving you another short lecture on Islam that'll drop either today or tomorrow, and then also we'll try to give you some instruction coming up for the final. So let's get into this. So Korea is, of course, this peninsula off of the northern section of China. It's really remarkable that Korea managed to maintain relative independence. There are periods where it was dominated by China. So not surprisingly, we're going to see a lot of Chinese influence, but it maintains its own culture and its own language and also a lot of its own political independence as well. I don't have the map here, but if you follow the Silk Road, the Silk Road actually ends up quite far north into the Northern Wei region, the Northern Wei dynasty. And so you actually have to travel south to get to Xi'an, Chang'an, Beijing, Dadu, the cities that were the capital cities. And that means that a lot of Buddhist influence actually gets to China later than it gets to Korea. And there's evidence that we have developed Buddhist kind of iconography coming from the Gupta period into Korea prior to the time of China. That's part of the reason it has its own strong, unique culture. We basically break this down into several periods. You have the Three Kingdoms, which you can see here. Later, the Silla dynasty will unify those. And we have the Goryeo dynasty and the Jonsun dynasty, which will take us all the way up to the 20th century. Most of what we're going to be looking at are going to be under the Silla period. This is the period where Korean culture really starts to distinguish itself. So let's take a look at some of these things. We're only going to take a look at a few and apologize for how little we're actually going to comment on Korea and Japan. But the old Silla period is noted for these beautiful votive crowns. These are funerary crowns. So again, these are discovered in tombs, and these are utterly unique to Korea. We have these kind of trident-like prominences that come off the crowns, and then all of these are decorated in jade kind of peanut shapes that are there as well. Jade, of course, representing life, wealth, and they're just exquisite. We have a whole variety, including inner linings that are mimicking cloth and other decorations. They're really quite exceptional. The other thing that Korea is really noted for is its sculptural tradition. And this is important because when we get to the Kamakura period in Japan, we'll see this explosion of sculpture in the Kamakura period, and the ultimate source of that sculpture is going to become from Korea. Korea is just across the Sea of Japan from Japan, and therefore you have a lot of influence. You're really going to see this in Silla period sculpture, and they have this very unique form. This is the contemplative Maitreya Buddha. So the Maitreya Buddha is the Buddha who will come into the future and who will be the fourth turning of the wheel, representing a time period where the Dharma has been forgotten and will be restored. He has this pendant leg, one leg hanging down, which is a feature adopted from India art, from Pala art. But the thing that really sets this apart is this incredibly sensitive gesture. One leg is up, the hand placed on it, and then we have this tender gesture where the hand is touching to the face. And it's this incredibly contemplative gesture. This comes out of the 7th century. Korea has a very unique system for numbering its national treasures. It can declare a particular work of art a national treasure, and they're all numbered numerically. It's kind of funny. I forget what the number is on this one. But this one is really one of these powerful forms. And we're going to see in the 11th and 12th century, the Kamakura period in Japan, this exact same posture and gesture. So it seems this sensitivity, this gesture of tenderness, of thoughtfulness, is going to be appropriated by the Japanese. And much of we cite as Japanese art actually ultimately has its innovation in Korea. And we'll see many different iterations of this. One of the things that happens after the old Silla period is we have the adaptation of celadon. Celadon is a cracked glaze, this beautiful kind of light white or gray-green color. And while there was celadon in China, it is the celadon of Korea that is especially remarked upon for its light and delicate qualities. Scholastic painting also comes over. And so all of the treatments of scholastic painting, this calligraphic style, this almost Taoist understanding of the landscape, the diminutive scale of figures, this ability to kind of walk your way through the landscape, large open spaces, all of these things that we know from scholastic painting, of course, comes over to Korea. But Korea is noted for having very expressive brushwork. In fact, many scholars regard the very expressive brushwork of, say, the Edo period in Japan to have largely originated with Korean artwork. Then they trade artists and quite a bit. So really fascinating stuff. Well, unfortunately, there's so much more I could say about Korea. But we do need to acknowledge that Korea is significant in that it developed its own script. This is one of the first times that a script was created. The traditional Chinese script was very difficult to learn, over 2,000 characters, just a master basic reading. But it was the Koreans who developed an alphabet that was called Hangul. It was developed in the mid-15th century under King Sejong. And it was the first scientific, clinically invented kind of alphabet. And they also invented movable type. This is something we don't talk about. The first book printed with movable metal type was actually printed in the 14th century in Korea, a couple centuries earlier than the Gutenberg Bible. So next time somebody tells you Gutenberg invented movable type, tell them, nope, it was the Koreans. So let's talk about Japanese art and architecture. So getting into Japanese art, we have to realize that Japanese culture is quite different than mainland Asian culture. We have, first of all, the fact, the reality, that Japan has a completely different political system. While Korea and China are going to be ruled basically as monarchies with a single ruler, Japan doesn't necessarily fall into that category. Instead, it's going to be feudal, going to have a lot of fighting, you know, vassals. And this is the period of the shogunate feudal Japan. We also have very unique native religious beliefs that impact the culture as well. Japanese chronology is also very deep. We have very, very old, prehistoric cultures, ancient cultures, but it's the Kofun period, where what we understand as Japan first starts to be created, they create these massive, in the Kofun period, they create these massive keyhole shaped mounds as burial mounds. And then in the Asuka and Nara period, into the Heian period, we're going to see a kind of consolidation of their culture and an influx of art and styles. This is when Buddhism arrives in Japan. And then it's the Heian Kamakura period that becomes the kind of classical period. And then we have feudal Japan, where Japan is ruled by a bunch of independent vassals. So the shogunate of Japan is very complicated. In theory, Japan has an emperor, but the emperor for most of his history has been more or less a figurehead. He represents the spirit of Japan, but he doesn't actually rule, at least not until you get to the Meiji Restoration and a little bit later. And you have a whole series of feuding military states with military orders. This is the Bushido, the code of their military order. This is where you have the samurais, and essentially samurais act as knights or warriors under the strict codes of conduct, what we would call chivalry, but they call Bushido. And there's very, very strict rules. The shogun is a kind of military warlord that oversees this. There are intense periods of centuries of war, but by the time we get to the Edo period, we kind of enter a golden age where, aside from minor skirmishes and conflicts, these vassals figure out how to live with each other. And so arms and weapons are going to be a very important part of their society, but also as military and court culture. And so, for example, this is a picture of the shogun from the Kamakura period. Also, it's not surprising that images of samurai and samurai armor and weapons are going to be very prominent in the arts. Even when we get to representations of kabuki and nō theater, representations of geishas and samurais are going to be very, very significant and continue to be significant even today as kind of nationalistic emblems and cultural emblems. There's also a very ancient religion in Japan that is quite a bit different than Buddhism or even traditional worship, Chinese traditional religion, and it's called Shinto, which is literally the way of the gods. And it is an animistic faith that incorporates aspects of ancestral worship. But it's the belief that everything has an anima or a spirit, a kind of life force that gives it a god or a spirit essence. In all living and non-living things, even household items like your umbrella and your shoes have a kind of spirit about them, and they must be taken care of. And so not surprisingly, you will see shrines everywhere. You will see shrines to trees, shrines to rocks, shrines to natural phenomenon, but also people try to respect even man-made structures. When we get to the main temples in Kyoto, in these temples, these are imperial shrines. And this gets us to state Shinto. So you have gods that represent the spirit of a tree, a forest, a mountain, a river, or what have you. The emperor becomes kind of a living embodiment of the spirit of Japan itself. And so these temples are therefore dedicated to the worship of the emperor, or at least kind of the worship of his genius or his essence. There are Shinto temples today. These are Shinto priests. And when you see the emperor in the past, the emperor takes on this role of being kind of the spirit or the symbol of the nation. This took a very ugly turn in the late 19th and early 20th century, when state Shinto became this expression of the military aspirations and fascism of the state. And he became a very powerful force. In fact, when the military powers that were ruling Japan during World War II tried to overthrow the emperor, but it was the emperor who actually allowed Japan to surrender, and he continued to serve. And part of the surrender of Japan was that we would honor the position of the emperor. The country would become a republic or the constitutional republic, but there was a kind of constitutional monarch, that is being the emperor, and so he allowed them to keep their culture. One of the other things is there are many native forms of Buddhism in Japan, including Shingon Buddhism and a whole variety of others. But one of the most important is Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is actually a mixture of Taoist beliefs, Chan Buddhist beliefs, which is a variety of China, and native Shinto beliefs. And it stresses intuitive knowledge and non-action. This is really hard to get. It's very, very similar to Taoism in that it's almost impossible to describe how you come by this. But it really strongly influences a couple areas of art that bear mention. First is the creation of gardens. Japan has a long history of gardens. The tradition of gardens ultimately comes from China, where Taoism inspired people to create gardens that weren't formal geometric structures, but were again attempts to recreate aspects of miniature. In fact, the oldest gardening book that is about landscaping gardening, that is not gardening for the purposes of horticulture, like fruit and vegetables and herbs and stuff like that, but is actually for creating landscape gardening, is the Sakuteki. And it is the oldest landscaping gardening book in the world, and it comes from Japan. And it's a really fascinating book, because it says when you build these gardens, you must respect the will of the stone. So in Shintoism, the stone has a will. And so you must place stones in that garden according to the will of the stone. The stone has a kind of response that you must listen to, to mimic nature. And this really becomes adapted in Zen Buddhism as a kind of form of representation. So you see gardens as an extrapolation of Buddhist thought. Now, that's really interesting. You're not going to see statues of Buddhas in these, but the Buddha is represented. He is represented almost by his lack of representation. And so you see these gardens that have rocks that are placed in fields of gravel. The gravel is raked around them. And these can be interpreted in several ways. You might interpret these as mountains peeking through cloud tops. Or you might interpret these as islands in an ocean. There are various kinds of Zen gardens. There are dry riverbed gardens. It's funny because the term in Japanese for a garden really means is literally water and mountain together. That's what it means. And then if you make a dry garden such as this, it's a dry water mountain. It seems odd to a Westerner, but that's what they mean is that we're recreating the aspects of natural topography, but we're doing it in miniature. And it creates places of meditation and contemplation. It's certainly a restrained aesthetic. The same thing could be true of Zen calligraphy. Zen calligraphy is a practice where the emphasis is on spontaneous action. And there's actually been a lot of science to back this up. We tend to think that we're fully rational creatures, that we have access to our full minds, but we don't. Our minds are kind of a black box, a subconscious that doesn't always communicate with us about its intentions. And we call this in modern science the zone or being in a flow state where your brain is working on things that you're not conscious of. And these create spontaneous moments of action where the expression is more important. So this is obviously a continuation of Chinese calligraphy and this emphasis on expression, but it adds this meditative aspect to it. So there are a lot of things that make Japan unique, not just by being an island, but by its very unique history and language. So when we look to the earliest history of Japan, we have Jomon culture. Jomon culture produces these wild, ecstatic ceramics with wonderful kind of bug-eyed features and really dynamic kind of tendrils and decoration. When we get to the Aoi period, we see stuff that seems more classically inspired by China. The bell shape here looks a lot like Shang and Zhu period bells from China. Although they have their own kind of characteristic. It's the Kofun period where we enter into these large kingdoms that have very strong military emphasis. And so we have depictions of ceramic characters with helmets and armor, and we even have some of this armor that comes together. But it is the Asuka and Nara periods where we see this influx of cultural imports. This is the Su, the Tang, and the Song period in China. And so we see the importation of the Chinese script. We see the importation of pottery and hand scrolls, and also architecture. So we start to see a solidification of culture under what's known as the Yamato polity that comes about. When we look at Japanese architecture, of course, it borrows the dugongs, the brackets, the extended eaves, the largely wooden architecture that we saw in China. Here we see the Golden Hall, etc. But we're also going to see a kind of reserve. Japanese art never pushes things quite to the excess of what we see in China. China has almost a Baroque sensibility, a love of surface decoration. And China's going to always have a kind of very controlled sense of decoration, probably again because of this unique heritage. When we get to the Heian and Kamakura periods, this is the classical period of Japanese art. Kyoto, the main city of the time, was founded in 794. And we start to see large scrolls and decorations. This is also the time period where we have these beautiful dyed blue indigo dyed paper scrolls. This one is the Lotus Sutra, which was one of the most popular sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. And this is done with gold ink on indigo dyed paper. As we see the decoration, it follows the same kind of lyrical quality that we know from Japanese scholastic painting. But the gold on the blue really does create a very strong, powerful dichotomy. This one is from a very famous story from the Lotus Sutra. This is the story of the Dragon Princess. So what we see here is the Dragon Princess in continuous narrative. She pops up in a couple of different locations. And she comes from the sea. You see all the ocean rising here. And she comes to a place known as Vulture Peak. There's the vulture in the mountain. You can see its profile. And she brings a valuable jewel. This is to show her piety and to demonstrate it to the Buddha so that she can receive enlightenment. And then the Buddha gives her a great boon or gift. And the gift is he turns her male. Now, that sounds rather sexist from a modern view. But this means that now she can pursue a life as a monk. And she can now pursue a life of enlightenment instead of her duties as a supernatural princess. She now has the ability to be a mortal man and pursue enlightenment. Beautiful depiction. It's at this time that we have really this lively art come in, that we start to see these lively dancing figures. Again, this animation, some of it's coming from China, but a lot of it is coming from Korea. The Heian and Kamakura period sculpture. This is also when we start to see what's called Yamata-e painting, which is this painting style that is known for a couple of strange things. It's known for this very angular quality to the figures. This very highly stylized design. So if you ever wanted to know where, you know, Gennady Tartakov got his ideas for Samurai Jack, well, there you go. It's actually kind of appropriate. And so, this tells the legends of the Kitano Shrine. The other thing that we see is a characteristic kind of isometric bird's eye perspective that allows us to look into the interior of buildings. So, we have these long narrative scrolls. In this case, they are fighting an oni, a kind of demonic ogre, who is coming out with lightning and fire shooting out. And then we can see more of this isometric perspective with individual knights being struck down and beautiful swirling battles of supernatural figures and also people in hell in flame. And we also have individual portraits. And again, you see some of this kind of angularity during the Ming period, in Ming dynasty, but it's the Japanese who really take this angular simplicity to the ultimate level. And not only do we see it in portrait painting, we also see it in sculpture. That sculptures of individuals, of shoguns. This is a shogun. I love how his cloth hat is rendered almost like faceted crystal. I love how his wonderful pants are angular and articulated out in this way. But sculpture for Buddhist shrines is not going to be that way. Sculpture for Buddhist shrines is going to be far more traditional. So, we have aspects of the traditional ideas of the Buddha going all the way back to the Gupta period. Patterned hair. But notice that the Kongo Rikishi Myos, which are guardian figures. These are a couple of wooden cedar-carved guardian figures that, again, are attendants to the Buddha or Bodhisattvas. We see their ripped, you know, ridiculous muscles and their flowing drapery. There's so much going on here is that the dynamic posing ultimately owes its inspiration all the way back to that Indo-Greek Gandharan art, but it also has this wonderful flowing drapery, which is quality out of Chinese art as well. One of my favorite examples of that is this wonderful representation of the Buddha. This is the Buddha looking back. Mikiri Dori, I think. And in this case, this one actually has reference to a local tradition, a local legend. A monk was preparing the shrine for the Buddha when the statue that was on the shrine stood up and began preceding him around the shrine, performing the ritual. The monk was so shocked that the statue stood up that the statue of the Buddha had to turn back over his shoulder. So, this is the Buddha looking back. You can see it here to say, you know, don't dawdle, keep up. It's a fun thing. It's like you may have just had this vision, but that doesn't excuse you not maintaining the duties of the shrine. So, because of this local tradition, this Buddha looking back over his shoulder as a kind of remonstration of those who wish to be pious becomes this very popular kind of theme that exists. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about Japanese arms, which are ridiculously popular. These things become works of art in their own right. Every little part is often decorated. This is the suba. The suba is the guard. So, that's the guard there. And you can see that it's decorated in scholar stones and bamboo. It has all the same aesthetics that we've established now. And these things almost were treated as crests, as kind of family heirlooms. And if you are a knightly culture, a shibari culture, the bushida culture of samurai, crests and decorations on your helmet and armor become a real important part of your heritage. In fact, most of the armor and most of the swords made from the Edo period were never used. They were only ever ceremonial, which is good for us, because then they end up being preserved, handed down from one generation to the other, and we can see them. And Zen painting, likewise, continues to follow in the tradition of this light calligraphic style, but having much more expressive quality. I doubt this painting took the artist anything more than about 20 minutes. This is someone who works with such quick confidence that in very, very quick gestural lines, he can convey the bamboo. And this is the patriarch of Zen here, you know, cutting it with a knife. Same thing in this wonderful piece, where we have this itinerant monk who's wandering, and look at the dynamism of the line that's being created. The Japanese also excel on the decorative arts. These are netsuke. Netsuke are little fobs that exist to hold a purse. And the purses are ojibre, I believe. Don't quote me on that. I don't have my notes in front of me. I'm doing this very quickly. But these are little purses, and this allows you to tuck it under your sash. And they were often decorated and carved in elaborate ways. Here's one that has a Portuguese trader painted on the surface of it, and then the netsuke, the little fob, is carved in the shape of a dog. So by the time the Portuguese started showing up, it's funny, everybody is exotic to somebody else. So while the West was filling their cabinets with spices and silks and porcelain from the East, the East was decorating their stuff with these strange people in their broad hats and broad pantaloons. There also was a great love of natural imagery and natural kind of what we call accidentals. Raku pottery and whole varieties of pottery where stains and coppery inclusions were allowed to exist and encouraged. The natural kind of accidental things beyond the control of the artist were seen as lovely and beautiful. And then, of course, I can't do much more to talk about the elaborate Japanese no costume or no theater except to comment on their beauty. One of the things I think we should concentrate on is the Japanese house and the Japanese garden. So much of what we assume in modern architecture is modern is actually inspired by Japanese art and architecture. Japanese houses were low. They were usually one story and they had broad eaves and they were open. There was a real ability to open up screens so that the house is kind of an open pavilion. A lot of Japan tends to be kind of hot and humid in the summer and so these things were built to be cool and airy, which I understand is a problem because lots of Japan is also pretty temperate and cold and snowy, but the houses are built for the hot weather, not the cold weather. So people I know who've lived in Japan always comment that it's always cold in the winter in Japan because the houses are built for the hot weather and not the cold weather. But when you see a Japanese house that is separated by shoji screens, which are screens of rice paper, which isn't actually made from rice, but that's what we call it. It's actually made from mulberry bark and it opens up onto a veranda that opens up onto your garden. It's a very open feel. So the open plan of architecture, rooms that aren't specialized but have furnishings that can be moved in and out, all these things are kind of features, the low horizontal profile, the open plan of modern architecture. And it's not an accident. Both Louis Sullivan and his apprentice, Frank Lloyd Wright, were really inspired by not actual examples of Japanese architecture, but copies of Japanese architecture. At the Columbia Exposition and at many of the expositions of the 19th century, it was popular to build pieces of foreign architecture. If people couldn't travel the world, you'd bring the world to them. And they built Japanese tea houses and copies of the temple at Kyoto so that people could see them. And these were very influential on American and later European architects. And of course, if you have a house that is undifferentiated, that the living space could be a sleeping space or whatever, you need screens. And you need screens to divide up those spaces so that you can provide people with privacy. Screens are often covered in gold leaf and painted. And these are very, very elaborate. And this brings us finally to Ukiyo-e prints and Ukiyo-e printed painting. By the time we reach the Edo period, the Edo period is a period towards the end. It's the last major period before the end of the modern age and the Meiji Restoration. Every emperor gets to name the age that they're in. And they declare these kinds of ages. So the Edo period was a long period from the 17th into the 19th century that was really excelled in decorative arts and in printing. It was also a period of relative peace and prosperity in Japan. So there's a lot of artistic production. And so they made these printings. And the term Ukiyo-e prints means that they are images that are floating. So you have very simple lines and figures floating on a background. You can see this in Edo period paintings. This ultimately has its final expression in some of the most famous prints of all time. The works of, in this case, Hokusai or Hiroshige, two different printmakers, who would make these beautiful prints. We did a whole series of pictures of Mount Fuji. That's Mount Fuji in the background. But I love how Mount Fuji looks like another way in this composition. And it was these kinds of images, these kind of solitary beautiful images of nature and landscape and genre scenes, which eventually found their way in the 19th century to Paris and America, and greatly influenced the Impressionists, who made domestic and pastoral scenes a major feature of their art. They also loved the flat, simple graphic compositions. But my favorite printmaker from this time period is Kuniyoshi Utamaro. Kuniyoshi Utamaro, instead of doing these wonderful, beautiful kind of pastoral or natural scenes, was very much inspired by Japanese mythology, and creates wonderful scenes as this samurai fighting monstrous crabs, or this one where he confronts a specter, a gigantic specter in the form of a skeleton. He deals with a lot of yokai. Yokai are myths of Japanese monsters and spirits and dangerous things. They're always just wonderfully dynamic and beautiful, and remain very, very popular. Okay, well, that's it for Korea and Japan. So we're wrapping up Asian art. I know both of these are short, but I do feel like we had to touch on them. And hopefully, either today or tomorrow, I will drop another short lecture. This one will be on Islam. Unfortunately, we're just getting near the end of the semester, running out of time. So hopefully, you'll be able to catch up with all of it. Also remember that the final will drop this Friday. You don't have to take it this Friday. You can take it anytime between Friday and April 30th. And it's also completely essay-based. So you do not have to remember the identifications. You do not have to remember artist, title, date, medium, etc. All of that will be provided for you. Instead, what you have to do is answer either a short, focused question, or a comparison and contrast between two images and a longer essay. But I hope that that'll be a little bit easier. It will be on the computer, but it also will be open note and open book. If you haven't checked out my final announcements yet, please do so. I put a link to it in the syllabus on Canvas. It's under Announcements. It gives all the details of what I expect for the final assignments, the turning in of the final papers and projects, as well as the final exam as we close out this last week. Thanks for being such troopers. Thanks for hanging in there. And look for the final lecture, which is coming either later today or tomorrow. Thanks so much. Bye.