World of Painted Poetry Unfolds on Japanese Screens at Asian Art Museum

By Emma Krasov
From laconic black and white depictions of reeds and snowy mountains to bursting with color detailed representations of nature’s bounty, “Beyond Golden Clouds: Five Centuries of Japanese Screens” is strikingly diverse. New exhibition at the Asian Art Museum (curator Melissa Rinne), jointly organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (curator Janice Katz) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (curator Philip Hu), brings to San Francisco most impressive and sometimes unexpected examples of household items turn precious pieces of art. The show ties together the ancient and the contemporary, from earliest ink-on-paper screens by Sesson Shukei, dated 1560s – to the 1990 Sasayama Tadayasu’s stoneware with metallic and selenium glazes rendition of a screen that doesn’t fold, yet stands as a symbol for the ever-popular art form. All screens in the exhibit are presented without Plexiglas vitrines that usually separate viewers from artworks. This proximity allows for better appreciation of various media used to narrate poetic landscapes and fairy tale scenes often supplemented with written poetry – each fragment visible from another angle or temporarily hidden in the folds of a screen. Ink, natural color and gold leaf on paper have been used by generations of artists to express their fascination with changing seasons, animal kingdom, plant world, and historic legends known through literary sources. On a pair of six-panel Chinese-style landscape screens from 1602 by Kaiho Yusho, distant mountains are depicted in washed-ink outlines, while scarce vegetation, fragments of dwellings peeking through a fog, and barely visible boats on perceived water come into being through sharp minimalist strokes of a brush. Another pair of screens, purely Japanese-style, by Hasegawa Soya (1650) is titled “Willow Bridge and Waterwheel,” and presents a solid shiny surface, richly covered with gold leaf squares; torn gold pieces (to convey rippled clouds and water), and exquisite paintings of willow trees framing the arched bridge over the Uji River in Kyoto prefecture. A great example of the traditional art form’s infinite possibilities comes with a 1921 creation of “Blue Phoenix” by Omura Koyo. Color-rich, full of light, and very detailed, the paining uses ink, color, and gold on silk, offering a close-up of marvelously feathered blue-headed tropical birds among flaming red and orange blossoms and lush tropical greenery.
The Museum does a great job educating the public on the basic screen techniques, and explaining the intricacies of format, materials, subject matter, design and composition, used throughout centuries in a series of leaflets, brochures, and associated programs. More information: http://www.asianart.org/. Image: courtesy Asian Art Museum, San Francisco