Word: ukiyo
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...Buddhist scroll hanging in a friend's house provides Author Maraini with one of his key themes: "Free yourself from attachment to useless things." The Japanese mind is obsessed with the transience of things, which may help to explain both gimcrack exports and the scroll paintings of ukiyo-e ("the floating world") of the theater and the geisha. This wars with the principle of permanence reflected in the Shinto worship of nation and ancestor. Innovations change the Japanese scene without changing the Japanese...
...Heel of a Shoe. The woodprints that flourished in 17th-19th century Japan were called Ukiyo-e, meaning "Picture of the Passing World." They were just that: pictures of solemn actors, sprightly geishas, idyllic landscapes. Japan's modern wood-printers turned to semiabstract compositions, employ many techniques known to their forerunners; e.g., they often wet their paper to obtain a certain texture, but also experiment with leaves, string, the heel of a shoe to get special effects with an ingenuity Western printmakers have not displayed...
...most popular of the moderns, Kiyoshi Saito, 52, has achieved a success almost worthy of the top Ukiyo-e artists. In 1955 he exhibited 67 of his pieces in the U.S., in a grand gesture gave them all to the University of Michigan. In debt, like most of his contemporaries, to Western influence and a Western audience, Saito lately visited ancient Kyoto to recapture special Japanese qualities he feels his works lack, ruefully muses: "We have lost our Japanese origins. I keep on going to Kyoto to try to rediscover them." But to a Western eye, his origins are unmistakable...
...what amounts to a major shift in Japanese national taste, an almost forgotten Confucian scholar named Tomioka Tessai, who died in 1924 at the age of 88, is emerging as Japan's most popular painter since the Ukiyo-e masters of the 17th and 18th centuries. What makes his sudden rise to fame so surprising is that Tessai's work boldly departs from the polish and finish of Japan's professional, court-painting tradition. Instead, he used a rough, impulsive brushwork that often seems closer to the West than to the Orient...
...grasses, stunted pines and an artificial brook, sits the black kimonoed figure of Taikwan Yokoyama, Japan's greatest living traditional artist. A fiercely independent man of monumental rages, Yokoyama today firmly treads the paths laid out by Japan's past masters, paints in styles that recall the Ukiyo-e of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the decorative brilliance of the Kano school, and the Chinese Zen Buddhists before them...