24 Facts About Japanese art

Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture, ink painting and calligraphy on silk and paper, ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints, ceramics, origami, and more recently manga and anime.

Over time the Japanese art developed the ability to absorb, imitate, and finally assimilate those elements of foreign culture that complemented their aesthetic preferences.

Until modern times, the Japanese wrote with a brush rather than a pen, and their familiarity with brush techniques has made them particularly sensitive to the values and aesthetics of painting.

The Japanese, in this period, found sculpture a much less sympathetic medium for artistic expression; most large Japanese sculpture is associated with religion, and the medium's use declined with the lessening importance of traditional Buddhism.

The Japanese recognized the facets of Chinese culture that could profitably be incorporated into their own: a system for converting ideas and sounds into writing; historiography; complex theories of government, such as an effective bureaucracy; and, most important for the arts, new technologies, new building techniques, more advanced methods of casting in bronze, and new techniques and media for painting.

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Raigo paintings on the wooden doors of the Ho-o-do, depicting the Descent of the Amida Buddha, are an early example of Yamato-e, Japanese art-style painting, and contain representations of the scenery around Kyoto.

Japanese art's sixfold screen, Pine Wood, is a masterly rendering in monochrome ink of a grove of trees enveloped in mist.

Ukiyo-e and nanga: The school of Japanese art best known in the West is that of the ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints of the demimonde, the world of the kabuki theater and the pleasure districts.

Traditional, mostly stoneware, styles continued in many parts of Japan, but Japanese ceramics were transformed around the start of the Edo period, by a large influx of Korean potters, captured or persuaded to emigrate in the course of the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s.

In Europe and America, the new availability of Japanese art led to a fascination for Japanese culture; a craze known in Europe as Japonisme.

Japanese art enamels were regarded as unequalled thanks to the new achievements in design and colouring.

Lacquer from Japanese art workshops was recognised as technically superior to what could be produced anywhere else in the world.

At the start of the Meiji era, Japanese metalwork was almost totally unknown outside the country, unlike lacquer and porcelain which had previously been exported.

International exhibitions brought Japanese art cast bronze to a new foreign audience, attracting strong praise.

Proliferation of new types of art was supported by the tremendous growth of Japan's economy in the 1960s, remembered as the "Japanese economic miracle.

Triumph of the new forms of Japanese art was cemented at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, where dozens of avant-garde and conceptual artists were hired to design pavilions and artistic experiences for fair-goers.

Japanese avant-garde art had gone global, and had become something even the conservative government was proud to display to the world.

Japanese contemporary art takes as many forms and expresses as many different ideas as worldwide contemporary art in general.

Japanese art's pieces take a multitude of forms, from painting to sculpture, some truly massive in size.

Japanese art, valued not only for its simplicity but for its colorful exuberance, has considerably influenced 19th-century Western painting and 20th-century Western architecture.

Japanese art began defining such aesthetic ideas in a number of evocative phrases by at least the 10th or 11th century.

Japanese art has been influenced by the increasing role of the nation's mass-culture art in global pop culture.

Traditional Japanese art Aesthetics are forms of beauty in Japanese art culture that derive from the earliest centuries.

Japanese art buyers swept the Western art markets in the late 1980s, paying record highs for impressionist paintings and US$51.