Often, when we meet a work of art of Japanese origin, we manage to easily recognize its origin. But why? Of course, themes and iconographies can be recurring, but there is a technique that is often underlying many contemporary works: the Nihonga. This term was coined during the Meiji period (1868–1912) to indicate traditional Japanese painting, as opposed to the western oil style that the Japanese called “Yōga”, but this “way of making art” has its roots in much older eras, dating back to more than a thousand years ago.
Unlike the canvases on which the Westerners, the supports used in Nihonga are already painted, are the Washi paper (resistant and thin, made with mulberry fibers or other local plants), silk, wood or plaster, on which sumes ink (black ink made from soot and vegetable glue, used for centuries in the challigraphy and Japanese painting), pygimi minerals are applied. Gofun Bianco (pigment obtained from shell powder), animal or vegetable dyes and Nikawa (an animal glue) as an adhesive.
Nihonga is an extremely refined, slow and material technique, but it is also a bridge between the past and present of Japanese art. His subjects range from landscapes to flowers and birds, Japanese history (both true, and myths and legends) and human figures, especially feminine, in a celebration of everything that is attractive for the human eye. However, there are also symbolic, poetic or spiritual themes, with an evocative use of emptiness, vertical perspective and color.
Examples of contemporary artists who have made use of this technique are Takashi Murakami, Hiroshi Senju and Fuyuko Matsui.
One of them is very famous: the Japanese painter Takashi Murakami
By combining the traditional Japanese painting ideas with science fiction and souls, the artist Takashi Murakami (born in 1962) has become very famous in the last thirty years for his paintings, the sculptures and films populated by colorful motifs and characters.
After obtaining a three -year degree, a master’s degree and a doctorate from the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he studied the Nihonga techniques, Murakami founded the Hiropon Factory, a study/laboratory that has turned into an artistic production company and artistic management (now known as Kaikai Kiki).
Since the beginning of the 90s, Murakami has invented characters who combine aspects of popular cartoons from Japan, Europe and the United States: from his first character – Mr. Dob, who sometimes represents the artist himself – to various characters of souls and flowers, bears and smiling lions, his figures act as icons and symbols, and represent complex themes such as violence, technology and its intersection with fantasy. human.
The painter Nihonga Hiroshi Senju
Born in Tokyo in 1958, the painter Hiroshi Senju is famous in the world for his monumental paintings of waterfalls and cliffs, in which he combines a minimalist visual language rooted in abstract expressionism with elements of traditional Japanese painting, precisely Nihonga. Senju’s creative process and commitment to Nihonga are rigorous, also thanks to highly specialized and hand -made tools with natural materials, and to the fact that the artist personally sifts the hand paper, in search of impeccable sheets.
First Asian artist to receive an honorable mention at the Biennale Arte di Venezia (in 1995) Senju saw many of his paintings from being exhibited in corporate and public buildings, also because his work is now recognized by the general public, and in 2021 he created a monumental installation of a fluorescent cascade for the Chicago art institute.
Fuyuko Matsui, the Japanese painter
Fuyuko Matsui, who borrows the contemporary use of Nihonga from great artists such as Hayami Gyoshu (artist born at the end of the nineteenth century famous for his realistic style), is one of the most original voices of contemporary Japanese painting: in his paintings, made with the ancient traditional technique of Nihonga, explores themes of violence, loss and anxiety from a deeply female perspective. His work stands out within a wider current of Japanese art which, under a refined aesthetic surface, investigates trauma and restlessness. Although less known to the general public than figures such as Takashi Murakami himself or the even more famous Yayoi Kusama – known for the use of bright colors and references to the anime world – Matsui is part of this same tension between aesthetics and disturbing. Unlike them, however, it does so through an intimate and spiritual reinterpretation of the Japanese pictorial tradition, in particular with the refined use of the Nihonga technique.
Born in 1974 in a small mountain village, Mori-Machi, in the prefecture of Shizuoka, in Japan (where he lives and works again), Matsui passes his childhood in the ancient family home, where they lived 14 generations, and whose rugs depict “Sansuiga”, that is, mountains and ink painted rivers that already raised his imagination.
As he said, when he was a child, for punishment he was locked up by his parents in a closet in which ancient swords and paintings of ghosts were hung (in Japanese folklore the images of the ghosts would frighten the thieves). And perhaps it is precisely from this absurd experience that Matsui gave birth to the women of his paintings, with an inconsistent, elusive and definitely similar to a spectrum (it is an example Nyctalopiain which one of them is depicted while choke a rooster).
Matui studied at Joshibi Junior College of Art and Design in the capital and at the Tokyo University of the Arts. His work is influenced by Japanese painting – for example by the eighteenth -century Soga Shohaku, of the Edo period, known for the brushstroke characteristics – and by the Japanese folk tradition, with its spirits and monsters. The artist combines these ideas with the lessons of the history of western art, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer or anatomical artists.
For her, painting is a meticulous process of auto -indoors, through which her works become universal: the themes are often those common to all humans – such as life and death, sex and desire – but also have intense and traumatic variations, such as car and link with the spiritual world.
Matsui, despite being little known beyond the Japanese borders, is a decidedly prominent artist: think that he was awarded by the Committee for the emblem of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and his works are kept in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Hirano Museum, the Galerie Da-End, the Sato Museum of Art, of the Mori Art Museum, of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. As if this were not enough, it is also the first woman who has achieved a doctorate in Japanese painting.
