Japan is an archipelago of four major and numerous smaller islands. The islands lie in an arc across the Pacific coast of northeastern Asia. Japan’s closest neighbors are Korea and China, which both greatly inspired Japanese art and culture. For much of its history, the seas protected Japan from invasion, and over time foreign ideas were incorporated into a unique cultural setting.

The Japanese collection is second in size only to Chinese among the museum’s collections. Its fifty-five hundred Japanese art works, including ceramics, baskets, paintings, and prints, range from as early as 3000 BCE to the twenty-first century.

GALLERY HIGHLIGHTS

WHEN PICTURES SPEAK:
THE WRITTEN WORD IN JAPANESE ART

IN-FOCUS ROTATION THROUGH AUGUST 19, 2018

Words and pictures are often combined in Japanese art, to celebrate poems and stories, express religious teachings, and comment on current events. Though not unique to Japan, the marriage of text and image has flourished there, finding relevance within each new generation of artists, writers, and patrons.

The paintings in When Pictures Speak: The Written Word in Japanese Art show the great historical and thematic range of this practice. The largest group of works, on the opposite wall, consists of pictures with texts from secular literature, especially Japanese poems (waka) in the style favored at the imperial court. Religious works are represented by ink paintings inscribed by Zen monks, narrative scrolls (emaki), and iconographic drawings (zuzo). The selections also include two examples of text and image in satire.

More than literal transcriptions of a story, pictures can amplify the meaning of a text with newly invented details or change the tone through stylistic means (for example, the choice of bold color versus sparse strokes of ink). Similarly, inscriptions can complement the visual, adding not just stories or imagery, but also sensory elements like sound to the experience of looking. Calligraphic styles add their voices to the mix, as when dancing, rhythmic strokes are used for poems, or a more stately, formal style for an iconographic manual. As these examples show, words and pictures can be more eloquent together than apart.

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