Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Kaii Higashiyama: One Man's Path

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Kaii Higashiyama: One Man's Path

by John McGee

Kaii Higashiyama, Toshodaiji Miei-do Murals: Mountain Clouds (detail), 1975, color on paper on sliding doors, 177.5x376.4cm (Images courtesy the Yokohama Museum of Art)

Nihonga landscape painter Kaii Higashiyama (1908-99) had a good career. He was famous: He was commissioned several times by the Imperial Household Agency. He was prolific: He donated over 700 works to the Shinano Art Museum in Nagano. And he was successful: He permanently endowed the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts. 

This Higashiyama retrospective, the first since the artist's death, now gives us an opportunity to reassess his production on its own terms. The show features work spanning the artist's life, from the careful, delicate lines of a nandina shrub (1927) made during his student days at the Tokyo National University of Art and Music to his masterful murals and fusuma (sliding doors) paintings at Toshodaiji (1971-80) to his last image, of the evening star over a lake (1999). As not all of the 90 works can hang at once, some will be rotated. 

Higashiyama traveled extensively in Japan, Europe and China, making sketches of the landscapes for future paintings. And he also experimented somewhat before settling into his style, e.g. abstracting natural forms like snowy mounds along a river (Mountain Stream, 1953) or blobs of orange, yellow and red on an autumn mountainside (Valley, 1952). 

But much of the time Higashiyama seemed more interested in creating atmosphere than representing details or places. This led to many facile paintings of little depth. At his worst, Higashiyama illustrated generic fantasylands for dental office décor—a round white moon and repetitive, blocky blue-green trees reflecting in water, a mystical white horse in the woods. 

At his best, Higashiyama captured specific moods of distinct landscapes, as in a European castle seen through a frame of wintry trees hung heavy with snow or gnarled pines pinned to the sides of stone towers in the mists of Huangshan, China. 

In a pair of paintings from 1949, Higashiyama really nailed the color and shape of Japan's dominant geographic features. Clouds drift through forested green mountains in Clouded Mountain, and a shaft of sunlight struggles through a grey sky hanging low over a turquoise sea in Clouded Sea.

Kaii Higashiyama, Afterglow, 1947, color on paper, 151.5x212cm 

This water and mountain motif is repeated on a monumental scale in his masterpiece, the murals and fusuma from the Miei-do of Toshodaiji temple in Nara. The 68 paintings (58 are shown here) portray the landscapes associated with temple founder Ganjin, a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to Japan in the eighth century. 

In the temple, ink paintings of Ganjin's familiar territory—willow trees blowing in a breeze off Lesser West Lake in the monk's hometown of Yangzhou, steep hillocks poking above the Li River in Guilin, and the rocky fingers of Huangshan—surround a statue of the monk. Here the paintings have been installed between wooden beams and tatami floors that mimic their home. 

Most spectacular are the Japanese landscapes in shimmery blue and green mineral pigments. Mists rise up great, forested mountainsides. Waves splash over rocky outcroppings as they undulate slowly across an L-shaped wall of 16 fusuma (nearly seven meters). 

Usually these paintings are on public view only three days a year. But the 1,200-year-old Toshodaiji is currently under renovation, so they're here in Yokohama. For Nihonga lovers, this rare opportunity, combined with several nice pieces (like a curious collage of the four seasons spread across a pair of six-panel folding screens), may be enough to outweigh the general mediocrity of this exhibition.

This exhibition was held Jan-Feb 2004 at the Yokohama Museum of Art in Yokohama, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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