Visually stunning and intellectually riveting, the exhibition Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentieth-Century Japan presented the Honolulu Academy of Arts’s newly acquired Terry Welch Collection of over eighty Japanese ceramics, calligraphy, and paintings (in handscroll, hanging scroll, album, and both two- and six-panel screen formats) from late Edo through Showa periods (the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries). It demonstrated the claim—made by guest curator Michiyo Morioka and other panelists in the accompanying symposium—that unlike most schools of Japanese art (Kano-ha, Tosa-ha, Rinpa), Bunjinga (“literati painting”) is not determined by a single style, but rather encompasses a very wide range of styles, and is, in fact, better defined as an idea of what it means to be an artist. The exhibition, symposium, and the catalogue elucidate the intimate social and stylistic relations between classic Bunjinga and other contemporary schools such as Rinpa and Nihonga, as well as the historical, theoretical, and ideological connections with Modernism and with increased interest in individuality as an artistic and a social (if not a political) value.

Aficionados of Bunjinga (aka Nanga, literally "Southern [School] painting”)—the literati “school” introduced by Gion Nankai, Yanagisawa Kien, and Sakaki Hyakusen in the early eighteenth century and developed during the second half of the century by Ike Taiga, Tokuyama (aka Ike) Gyokuran (one of three women in the show), Yosa Buson, Noro Kaiseki, and their followers—were delighted to find fine examples from many of their favorites, including Kaiseki but also Ōtagaki Rengetsu, Nakabayashi Chikutō, Okada Hankō, Tomioka Tessai, and Yamamoto Baiitsu, among others. (Disappointingly, the small hanging scroll attributed to Gyokuran was deemed by the curators unlikely to be hers, based on its anomalous seal, though there may be stylistic grounds also.) What made the exhibition cutting edge, however, was the work by famous, highly influential artists who are rarely shown, such as Hine Taizan, Hidaka Tetsuō, Kinoshita Itsuun, and Okuhara Seiko (a woman painter), as well as by seventeen artists working three or more decades into the twentieth century.

Particularly exciting were the large screens, most in pairs and six-panels, a format not common in earlier Bunjinga (which functioned outside the system of regular patronage by imperial family, aristocracy, shoguns, and temples). Spectacular examples included Tsuji Kakō’s Cranes (ca. 1908), Suzuki Shōnen’s Old Pine (1900), Hirai Baisen’s Mountains in China (late 1920s), and Suzuki Hyakunen’s Spring and Autumn Landscapes (1866). The show’s opener, by Yokoi Kinkoku, Drawing Pure Spring Water to Compare Tea (early 1800s), which made a magnificent impact as one entered the exhibition, was also the centerpiece for the symposium talk by Yokoya Ken’ichirō (curator, Otsu City Museum of History, Shiga). His presentation, titled “The Literati Ideal and Reclusion in Yokoi Kinkoku’s Drawing Pure Spring Water to Compare Tea,” explored the role of sencha (“thin tea” as opposed to the mattcha or “thick tea” of the better-known tea ceremony) in bunjin life and the unusual motif (used by Kinkoku’s teacher Yosa Buson as well) of the small platform built for the tea-drinking over a rushing stream. His discussion of Kinkoku’s fascination with the history of sencha in China and early Japan (an interest shared by Kinkoku’s friends and especially Buson) illuminated not only this painting but a number of other works in the exhibition that show a startlingly specific knowledge of Chinese history and customs compared with the first and second generation of bunjin. This analysis, as well as that of the role of Kinkoku’s travels in his painting and his fascination with self-portraiture, were issues that ended up supporting Paul Berry’s closing arguments concerning the importance of lifestyle and artistic identity in Bunjinga.

Doi Gōga’s Screens of Human Figures and Bamboo (1865) depicts, in addition to unusually frenetic and atmospheric bamboo, six highly eccentric emaciated humanoid figures. Berry’s catalogue analysis establishes beyond question that, based on the inscriptions, far from being the hungry ghosts or demons that many viewers have taken them for, they are satirical and cynical comments on the human condition. While we are accustomed to seeing such commentary in contemporary Zenga, it is much rarer to find it coming, as here, from a Confucian perspective.

Dōmoto Inshō’s Chinese Garden (1923), based on his visit to Suzhou gardens during his second trip to China, reinterprets a classic literati theme on a new scale. It does so in an innovative manner with what I’ve called (Mara Miller, The Garden As an Art, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) an “immersed view” of the garden, that is, placing the viewer within the garden rather than looking at it from a distance, as is common in literati painting, or from above (a “bird’s eye view”). The result is something close to a real-world scale (given the size of the screens).

Surprises included the wide range of subject matter, the exhilarating colorists (such as Kobayashi Shunshō, Tomita Keisen, Takakura Kangai, Ogawa Sen’yō), and a number of individual works. One favorite is the gassaku (collaborative painting and calligraphy) by literati stalwarts such as Tani Bunchō and Ichikawa Beian that also includes Sakai Hōitsu, a painter usually described as a member of the Rinpa group. Fusen Tetsu’s collaborated with Inui Katsuji (who painted the figures in Tetsu’s jungles) on Scenes of the South Sea Islands (1944), a theme that, after Japan was given administrative control over parts of Micronesia, intrigued many Japanese painters, including Kawabata Ryūshi¹ and Maruki Toshi (aka Akamatsu Toshiko).² Equally delightful were Fujimoto Tesseki’s whimsical album Pleasures of the Literati Life (1856), which recalls Taiga and Buson’s collaboration on the Juben Jugi or Ten Pleasures and Ten Conveniences (1771), and the ceramics: a sake cup and a tea caddy, both with calligraphy, by Rengetsu, and a collaborative set of five sencha cups by Tessai, Imao Keinen, and Tajika Chikuson.

The aforementioned one-day symposium on the exhibition, held September 13, 2008, brought together collector Terry Welch and five additional experts from Japan and the United States.³ The symposium is the latest in an innovative series of annual symposia studying Japanese and Chinese arts and the connections between them in the early modern period and (lately, especially) the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previous Honolulu Academy of Art symposia include “Trade Taste and Transformation” in conjunction with a 2006 exhibition of early seventeenth-century Jingdezhen porcelain made in China for early Edo Japanese tea ceremony cognoscenti, and last year’s “When Art Met History,” in conjunction with “New Songs on Ancient Tunes: 19–20th Century Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy from the Richard Fabian Collection,” which included papers focusing on epigraphy (the study of ancient inscriptions) and the development of modern Chinese arts within an international context, along with trade-dependent linkages with Japan. Some of the same issues and artists from this year’s symposium were discussed then.

Welch opened the symposium with photographs of his own garden and a discussion of his building of the collection. His talk, “Celebrating the Interconnectedness of Life: A Literati Ideal,” illustrated the themes of the collection, especially the importance of the interconnections of arts, friendship, and landscape, and the centrality of identity and lifestyle to the bunjin project. This point was elaborated by Berry in the final talk of the symposium, “The Role of Bunjinga in the Emergence of Artistic Identity in Early 20th-Century Japan.” Stating at the beginning that there would not be enough time to prove his argument fully, Berry was nonetheless able to elaborate his dual points: that it is the life that is at the core of bunjin identity in the latter period (as well as the earlier), and that identity (rather than style, here reinforcing Morioka) is what defines the core of Bunjinga (painting). While the point is broadly recognized with regard to early Bunjinga (thanks to the work of Lawrence Marceau and others [Lawrence Marceau, Takebe Ayatari: A Bunjin Bohemian in Early Modern Japan. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004]), it may be even more important in the twentieth century in the context of modernization and the rise of nationalism, and has yet (I believe) to be established in print (at least in English). We await Berry’s publication.

Morioka, curator of Literati Modern, elaborated the basic artistic concepts of "unbeautiful” and “disorderly” in Bunjinga and their continuation in its later evolution into “Shin-Nanga,” while stressing the importance of lifestyle over artistic style both in the definition of Bunjinga and in the self-identity of bunjin, phenomena connected with new perceptions of individuality and with modernization.

Shimada Yasuhiro, who has done so much pioneering work on Yōga and Nihonga in Taisho and Showa periods and curated a number of groundbreaking exhibitions in Japan, analyzed in “The Underlying Current of Nanga in Japanese Art” the differences between “Southern style” and “Northern style” painting in China and Japan, with attention to the distinctively Japanese shaping of literati art in that country.⁴

In “Literai Modernists: The Influence of Bunjinga on Modern Japanese Painters of the Early 20th Century,” John Szostak presented the much-needed corrective to published but (as he proved) inaccurate views of Bunjinga as outmoded, ignored, or struggling during Meiji and the twentieth century—an argument borne out well not only by his statistical evidence of Bunjinga shows, study groups, and participants in exhibitions of a more general kind, but by the variety and vitality of the twentieth-century pieces in the Honolulu Academy of Arts’s exhibition itself.