Plate 1-29 Eiraku Hozen (1795–1854), Set of five teacups for steeped tea (sencha), mid-19th century. Kinrande-style porcelain with overglaze red enamel, underglaze blue, and gold leaf, height 3.8 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Museum Shop Fund, 355: 1991.1-5. Designed for use in the Chinese-style tea ceremony of sencha, Eiraku’s teacups are suffused with an elegant Chinese fūryū taste in vogue among sophisticated admirers of Chinese culture.
Plate 1-30 Kikugawa Eizan (1787–1867), The Jewel River in Ide, Yamashiro Province, from the series Fūryū seirō bijin mutamagawa uchi (Elegant beauties of the green houses matched with the six Jewel Rivers), ca. 1810. Color woodblock print, horizontal oban format, 23.8 x 34.7 cm. Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1964-0040. The beauty of geisha was sometimes described as fūryū and many prints that portray them, like this one, feature titles using the word. Here, the allusion to Heian period aesthetics is underscored through the subject of the Jewel (Tama) River, popular among ancient courtly poets.
KAREI
SUMPTUOUS ELEGANCE
Throughout the medieval and early modern periods (roughly the fourteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries) the formal, public life of Japanese aristocrats and élite warriors required the use of luxurious objects and clothing befitting their status. These objects are described with the aesthetic expression karei (literally “flowery beauty”) that connotes a sumptuousness and elegance most evident in styles of clothing and theatrical costumes, residential furnishings, including gold leaf ground folding screens and lacquer objects made for trousseaus and other official gifts, and accoutrements and garments for military display, court pageantry, and Shinto rituals. Befitting the association of karei with pomp and ceremony, the word entered the Japanese vocabulary during the ninth century, a time of great opulence in the performance of court rituals (see Plate 2-49, a screen of an ascension ceremony for a seventeenth-century empress that exudes this aesthetic). The ambiance of karei persists into the present in imperial court and public festivals, especially those celebrated in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, that recreate court life in the ancient Heian era.
Plate 1-31 Motoyoshi (active late 16th–early 17th century), Lacquer saddle with scenes of some the 53 stations of the Tōkaidō Road, Momoyama period, dated 1606. Gold lacquered wood, length 40 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-202-13 O. Photo: Tiffany Matson. This saddle features small scenes, each carefully identified, of the individual way-stations along the Tōkaidō, the highway that linked the political capital of Edo (Tokyo) with the imperial capital of Kyoto, in what is possibly the earliest known representation of this subject, made famous later in woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.
Plate 1-32 Arita ware, Kutani-style dish with design of peonies, late 17th–early 18th century. Porcelain with polychrome overglaze enamels, diameter 32.7 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Samuel Hammer, 63-33. Photo: Joshua Ferdinand. Bold, brightly colored designs like these against a golden background reflect the same karei taste as gold leaf ground folding screens.
Plate 1-33 Kosode robe with designs of fans, bamboo, plums, and pines, early 18th century. Gold figured satin ground with stencil tie dyeing, silk and metallic thread embroidery, with an orange plain silk lining, 139.7 x 111.8 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 31-142/21. Photo: Tiffany Matson. Many karei designs on women’s robes juxtaposed unlikely motifs. Here, purely decorative folding fans are scattered amongst plants known as the “three friends of winter,” Chinese Confucian symbols of perseverance and integrity.
Plate 1-34 Nuihaku-type Nō robe with paulownia vine design and horizontal stripes, 18th century. Gold leaf covered silk ground with silver foil and silk thread embroidery, 157.5 x 147.3 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 31-142/1. Photo: Jamison Miller. The glittering beauty of this Nō robe contributed to the stately karei atmosphere of the Nō theater.
Plate 1-35 Iizuka Tōyō (active ca. 1760–1780), Tiered stationery box (ryoshi bako), ca. 1775. Makie lacquer over wood core, gold and silver inlays, and colored lacquer, 21.6 x 34.9 x 21 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: David T. Beales III Fund, F78-23. Photo: E. G. Schempf. This boldly decorated box expresses the elegant karei taste of the upper echelons of the samurai class. Its varied minute designs, including family crests, cranes, and sailboats, as well as patchwork areas of pure abstraction, were created using a multitude of lacquer techniques that required many months of patient effort on the part of the artist to complete.
KABUKU AND BASARA
OUTLANDISH ELEGANCE
After the Tokugawa warriors took control of the country in the early seventeenth century, urban commoner culture flourished as never before. Participants in this new culture included warriors forced to become masterless samurai (rōnin), who fought on the losing side of the recent civil wars, and commoners displaced by the conflicts. These individuals became subsumed into the ranks of the newly emerging urban commoner classes who participated en masse in popular Shinto shrine festivals, attended Kabuki theater performances, and partook of other leisure activities, many of which took place in new red light districts of Japan’s burgeoning urban centers, where banquet halls like the Sumiya, were constructed. Their reckless attitude became identified with a new type of extravagant fūryū elegance known as kabuku, literally “twisted, out of kilter, or outlandish.”38 This word implied “rebellion against conventional social and artistic attitudes, with a strong suggestion of a clash with norms of sexual behavior comparable to that carried today by words such as ‘gay’ or ‘queer.’”39
The distinguished Japanese art historian Tsuji Nobuo (b. 1932) was the first scholar to recognize a broad range of arts and artists whose works seem to have been inspired by a sense of heterodoxy and playfulness implicit in the word kabuku. He traced this aesthetic from the dawn of Japanese history to the present day, and noted that it reached its apogee during the Edo period in the work of artists he has famously described as eccentrics.40
Influenced by Tsuji’s writings, recently another older expression for this bold aesthetic, basara, has been revived by the neo-Nihonga (modern Japanese painting) artist Tenmyouya Hisashi (b. 1966). He claims to have made this aesthetic the basis of his art because it expresses the current climate of social upheaval in Japan. Tenmyouya organized an exhibition titled Basara for the Spiral Garden Gallery in Tokyo in 2010. In addition to showcasing his own work, the exhibition featured pre-modern Japanese art that inspired him. In the catalogue, he described basara as:
the family of beauty that stands on the opposite end of the spectrum from wabi sabi and zen…. The term basara originally referred to social trends that were popular during the Nanbokucho Period (1336 to 1392), and people with an aesthetic awareness that wore ornate and innovative wardrobes and favored luxurious lifestyles. The term comes from the name of the 12 Heavenly Generals [Buddhist guardians] and originally means “diamond” in Sanskrit. Just as diamonds are hard and can break anything, the term was taken to mean people that rebel