JAPANESE CULTURE, EXPLAINED

Byōbu: a painting that folds and stands

屏風

A Japanese folding screen divides or arranges interior space and may carry painting or calligraphy. It can be moved, folded away and opened at different angles, which also change how the image is seen.

Panels and their construction

Panels and pairs

A six-panel screen is one object with six connected leaves. One screen is an isseki; a pair is an issō. Other panel counts exist. A single survivor may have been made alone or separated from its pair.

A flexible connection

Hinges connect the leaves so alternating folds let a screen stand without sliding-door tracks. Connections may use paper, metal or cord. Paper hinges, common in Japanese painted screens, allow folding in both directions. Changing the angles changes the screen’s width and the direction each painted surface faces: it is a spatial object as well as an image.

Beneath the picture

Wooden lattice and paper layers support the picture. Tobunken.

Removing old backing paper: a conservation detail. Tobunken.

Remounting the picture on its support. Tobunken.

Paper layers over a wooden lattice support the picture and moderate humidity. The conservation process shown by Tobunken removes the support, treats the painted sheet from behind and builds new underlayers. Repairing the visible picture may therefore require work on its hidden structure.

Furniture and painting through time

From a furnishing to a continuous picture

One screen from the seventeenth-century Hiyoshi Sannō festival pair, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg.

Folding screens reached Japan from China around the seventh and eighth centuries. They blocked draughts and screened views, and furnished aristocratic interiors in the Heian period. Paper hinges developed during the Muromachi period helped join adjacent painted surfaces into a broad composition extending across the folds.

Screens beyond the room divider

Screens also furnished miniature settings. An Edo-period narrative screen discussed by Fukuoka City Museum measures only 15.5 cm high by 55 cm wide and served a hina-doll display. Its scale and setting give it a different purpose from a full-sized room divider.

Gold, ink and modern observation

Kanō Eitoku’s Momoyama-period Cypress Trees sets a spreading giant tree against gold; originally sliding-door paintings, it was later remounted as screens. Soga Shōhaku’s 1760 The Recluse Lin Hejing uses ink and light colour, with plum branches extending across the pair. Around 1901, Takeuchi Seihō drew on observations in European zoos for Tiger and Lion. The folding format continued while materials, subjects and methods of observation changed.

Reading the unfolded painting

Following a branch across a pair

Left screen of Soga Shōhaku’s The Recluse Lin Hejing, 1760: cranes and spreading plum branches. Mie Prefectural Art Museum.

Right screen of the same pair: Lin Hejing and two attendants beneath the tree. This small reproduction shows the overall composition. Mie Prefectural Art Museum.

In Shōhaku’s The Recluse Lin Hejing, start with the thick trunk on the right screen, then follow its branches into the left screen with two cranes. The museum identifies this branch as a link across the pair; Lin Hejing and two boys appear beneath the tree on the right. The composition therefore extends beyond an individual leaf or even one screen. Flat reproductions clarify the overall arrangement, while the folding object adds angles and depth in a room.

Check your understanding

What could be missed by viewing only one screen of Lin Hejing?

The branch links the right-hand tree and figures with the cranes on the left, organising the pair as a whole.

What changes when the panels are folded more deeply?

Its width and the orientation of the painted leaves change, altering viewpoints without changing the painting.

Why might conservation reach behind the painted sheet?

The hidden layers support the picture and moderate humidity, so their condition affects the painted surface.

Sources and images