Meet the subject
水墨画
Ink painting builds an image through the density of ink and the movement of a brush. In Japan its subjects include landscapes, birds, flowers and figures. Chinese paintings, travelling monks and later artistic schools shaped a practice that extends beyond one religious setting.
Ink can form a line, a dot or a broad wash.
Some ink paintings include light colour.
Paper or silk, water, ink and brush handling affect the visible result.
A solid ink stick can be ground with water on an inkstone, then applied with a brush. Paper and silk are common painting supports. The brush’s moisture, the concentration of ink and the way it touches the surface change the lines and washes.
A painter can distinguish trees, rocks and distance through variations from black to pale grey. Unpainted areas also organize the image: a gap might suggest water or mist, working with the lines and washes around it.
Paper and silk are painting supports; hanging scrolls, handscrolls and folding screens are ways of mounting and displaying a painting. A hanging scroll is hung for viewing and rolled for storage. A handscroll is opened from right to left in successive sections, with only part of the image exposed at a time. A folding screen has connected panels that fold and can divide or screen an interior. Ink painting uses these formats for landscapes, flowers and birds, figures and other subjects.
Handscroll viewing direction: ← right to left
Chinese paintings and methods reached Japan through collecting and travel, including exchanges involving Buddhist monks. Zen institutions became important places for studying and circulating such works in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Painter-monks including Josetsu and Shūbun precede Sesshū in this history.
In his inscription on the 1495 Broken-ink Landscape, the Muromachi painter-monk Sesshū described studying in China and carrying on the traditions of Josetsu and Shūbun in Japan. He made the painting at the request of his pupil Josui Sōen. The inscription connects a particular work with travel, training and the transmission of a painting method.
The Kanō school used ink methods in paintings for warrior patrons and architectural interiors, alongside work in colour. Edo-period nanga, or literati painting, drew on Chinese literati models. The eighteenth-century painter Ike no Taiga studied Chinese woodblock painting manuals brought to Japan and also absorbed Japanese and Western methods. His ink-on-paper work 漁楽図, held by the Kyoto National Museum, offers a particular example: changing brushwork and ink tones organize its landscape.
Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) made Metempsychosis in 1923 as an ink-on-silk handscroll. Extending roughly forty metres, it follows water from a mountain droplet through streams and rivers to the sea. It provides a specific modern use of ink and the handscroll format after medieval landscape painting.
The Kyoto National Museum holds a handscroll in ink and light colour on paper, dated by the museum to the fifteenth–sixteenth century. Its landscape style follows the Southern Song painter Xia Gui. Both its long format and touches of colour widen the picture beyond a purely black-and-white hanging scroll.
No. Some combine ink with light colour.
Japanese ink painting developed through East Asian travel, collecting and the study of Chinese paintings.
It records his training references and connects the work with a specific pupil and transmission of method.
A handscroll opens from right to left in successive sections. A hanging scroll is hung for display and rolled for storage.