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Literati, Bunjin, Nanga:
The Art of the Scholar-Amateur in Japan
From the early
eighteenth century on, literati followed the tenets of the
Chinese wenren (Japanese: bunjin) movement,
producing paintings that were simplified and personally
expressive or abstracted, sometimes to the point of appearing
amateurish. In part, this was to avoid the onus of being thought
of as professional artists, who in the literati's view diluted
their personal message by producing detailed, representational
paintings for sale to their patrons. The underlying aim of the
literati artist was to express the virtue of his or her
character and to achieve harmony with nature by avoiding
vulgarity and artifice. Because calligraphy was thought to
mirror the soul of its practitioner, literati paintings were
based on calligraphic materials and techniques.
The literati
movement arose in part as a reaction against the stultified
paintings of the Kano school, which was the dominant
painting academy in Japan during the Edo period (1615-1868).
Study sources for the bunjin of the early to mid-eighteenth
century included imported and reproduced painting manuals,
imported paintings that were often of mediocre quality, and
works by Chinese Obaku monks at Manpukuji in Uji or Chinese
merchant-artists who settled briefly in Nagasaki.
Literati school
painting is also called Nanga (Southern) painting, which refers
to the theories of the Chinese painter Dong Qi Chang (1555-1636).
Dong divided Chinese artists of the past into Southern and
Northern schools based on the character of Southern or Northern
school Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhism. The Southern Chan school
generally believed in spontaneous enlightenment while the
Northern believed in enlightenment through gradualist Buddhist
practice. These two divisions came to mirror the methods of the
scholar-amateur artist, who searched for profundity through
direct self-expression, versus the professional artist, who
strove to please a patron.
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