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Flowers of the Moon: The Art of Kaii Higashiyama
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11707 |
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THE ARTS
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4 / 1987 |
2,937 Words |
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Betty Rogers Rubenstein
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Japan's most celebrated artist, seventy-nine-year-old Kaii Higashiyama, attracted over one million people of all ages to exhibits of his work between the summer of 1981 and the spring of 1982 alone. His worldwide reputation - stretching form Germany to China, from Rome to Washington - rests on his quiet but compelling landscapes and seascapes painted in the traditional Nihon-ga (Japanese style). Higashiyama's art is on display at the Japanese embassy in Washington, and his paintings have been given as official state gifts to Queen Elizabeth II and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
From humble beginnings as the sickly child of a poor family, Higashiyama grew up in the internationally oriented port city of Kobe, where he first encountered Western culture. "I was interested in the West, but in my college days in Tokyo I studied Nihon-ga," Higashiyama said in an interview. Today, Higashiyama has reached a pinnacle reserved for few living artists. His many distinguished patrons include the Imperial Household Agency, which commissioned him to create a painting for the new Togu Imperial Palace in 1960 and to paint Evergreen for the New Fukiage Imperial Palace, constructed to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the emperor of Japan in 1961. In 1968, he completed Waves at Dawn as murals for the New Imperial Palace. The Japanese government commissioned the artist in 1972 to do a painting as a gift for Mao Tse-tung to celebrate the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.
An even greater honor came to Higashiyama in 1971 when he was asked to paint a set of murals for the hall at the Toshodai-ji Temple complex near Nara, where the precious dry-lacquer sculpture of Ganjin (d.763), founder of the Risshu sect of Japanese Buddhism, is kept. This project took him eleven years to complete.
Why has Higashiyama's art received such acclaim? The best answer to that question is found in studying the works themselves. His well-known Flowers Luminous at Night exemplifies the poetic energy of his conceptions, which capture the mutability and rhythmic endurance of the natural world and transform the art of seeing into an act of reverence. Describing this work as the "chance meeting" of the short-lived cherry blossoms and the full moon, Higashiyama remembers that as he sat meditating in the moonlight in Maruyama Park in Kyoto, he felt the moon and blossoms were calling to each other. The closeness to nature that opens his mind to the voice of blossom and moon, plus astute observation and patient sketching, comprise the undergirding for Higashiyama's art - an art that is not as far away from modern art as one might think.
The Modern and Traditional Harmonized
A painting such as Flowers Luminuous at Night appears to owe something to abstract expressionism as well as Oriental vision. This work conveys the special Japanese feeling for the transience of blossoms shimmering in the misty silence of spring moonlight; however, while such an image captures fleeting moments of color and light and comments on the passing of time to the satisfaction of a Japanese viewer, we note that the composition does not conform to one point perspective. The viewer is suspended in the air, looking at the heart of the cherry tree, while the line of the hill and the orb of the moon rise above eye level. This technique parallels the freedom from Renaissance perspective as developed by the Cubists in the early twentieth century. The dominance of color over narrative
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