Storytelling In Japanese Painting

Presents 17 classic Japanese stories as told through 30 illustrated handscrolls ranging from the 13th to 19th centuries.

A uniquely comprehensive survey of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries. The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realized in a wide range of media and formats. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquerware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure. Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colorful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.

Rakugo is the traditional Japanese art of storytelling. The stories are also called rakugo, or hanashi, and they are performed by professional narrators called rakugoka or hanashika. The customary place where rakugo stories are told is the vaudeville-type variety called the yose.

A fascinating book on the elegant paintings of birds and flowers in Edo-Rinpa painting The Rinpa school is one of the historical schools in Japanese painting established in 17th century Kyoto. Later in 19th century Edo (old Tokyo), Hoitsu Sakai, who worshiped and was influenced by Korin Ogata, revived this genre with his elegant, poetic and refined taste. This book showcases not only the most popular works of the Edo-Rinpa style but also features unique and innovative works from Kiitsu Suzuki, Hoitsu Sakai's own disciple, and shows how Rinpa style has been passed on to the modern painters such as Shunso Hishida and Sekka Kamisaka. Written by Momo Miyazaki, a specialist in Edo period painting and the curator of The Museum Yamato Bunkakan, this book will be an informative must have treasury book for Japanese art lovers, creators, and artists.--Momo Miyazaki

This is a step-by-step guide to creating Etegami, a Japanese postcard art that combines simple hand-painted images with handwritten words on washi postcards. The book is divided into 22 brief chapters that lead the reader through the origins, the materials, the process, and the possibilities of the art of Etegami. It includes links to online suppliers of etegami materials and tools. Please take note of the dimensions and be warned that it is a very SMALL book (60 pages), but it is packed to the gills with content.

Rakugo is the traditional Japanese art of storytelling. The stories are also called rakugo, or hanashi, and they are performed by professional narrators called rakugoka or hanashika. The customary place where rakugo stories are told is the vaudeville-type variety called the yose. This book is divided into three parts, including nine chapters and an epilogue, and also includes notes, three appendices, a bibliography, glossary, and index.

RAKUGO evolved as a form of entertainment for ordinary people during the Edo period; yet, it is not an old, dying art struggling to find relevance in modern society. All you need is a fan, a hand towel, and your imagination!

Beginning with the claim that the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period was a phenomenon of visual culture, Explaining Pictures reexamines the history (and historiography) of medieval Japanese Buddhism. With theoretical sophistication and a full appreciation of the power of imagery to convey and control religious meaning, it investigates a range of aspects of etoki, including the particularly active role of itinerant nuns, whose performances were especially edifying to female audiences, as well as the visual hagiography of the reputed founder of Japanese Buddhism, the pictorial projections of Buddhist paradise and hell, and the explanation, through visual imagery, of sacred mountains. Explaining Pictures is the first book-length study in English devoted to the phenomenon of Buddhist art as religious propaganda and pictorial storytelling as a form of popular culture in medieval Japan. A truly interdisciplinary study, it suggests fruitful avenues of discussion between art historians and historians of Japanese Buddhism. Scholars and students with an interest in Japanese Buddhism, art, and social and cultural history will find its examination of significant issues fresh and stimulating. It will also find an appreciative audience among those concerned with the relationship between art and religion, the mechanics of proselytization, and Asian visual culture.