Landscape

Daizan was a native of Mino and served its daimyo in official capacities at Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. As an artist, he specialized in landscapes modeled after the Chinese scholar-painters of the Ming dynasty; as a poet, musician, and literary scholar, he wrote several books. After retiring, he became a monk and traveled to northern Japan before returning to Tsuyama, where he died at the age of sixty-two.In this confidently executed landscape, influences from Chinese painting are quite obvious. But Nanga painters such as Daizan employed calligraphic qualities in their paintings that were Chinese in principle but also appealed to a strong, native Japanese sense of line. With the absence of strongly receding depths and misty distances, the Chinese elements fade off; and a Japanese feeling for linear and surface composition begin to take over. (“Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation in East Asian Art,” curated by Cornell PhD student Yuhua Ding under the supervision of Ellen Avril and presented at the Johnson Museum January 23-June 12, 2016)