Scholarly record

HAIGA PAINTING AND WESTERN ARTISTS

Codrescu, I.

Abstract

This paper focuses on haiga painting—a Japanese art which unifies painting, poetry and calligraphy on the same surface—and the influence that it had on some of the Western artists in their creations at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century. Haiga painting was created together with the haiku poetry in Japan during the 17th century. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part consists in presenting the appearance of the haiga painting in Japan, its aesthetics, and its evolution from the 17th century to the 20th century. We show the historical context of haiga in Japan, its terminology, its spiritual “roots” and influences which contributed to its appearance and its content (Shintoism, Buddhism, tea ceremony, ikebana, Zenga and Nanga). We speak about the specific traditional instruments and materials in haiga art and we try to point out the main aspects of its aesthetics and the most important masters and schools of this art in Japan. One of the most important things in haiga art is the relationship between image and text, or how to juxtapose image and text. The text in haiga is analysed from different points of view: the text as a poem, the text as calligraphy, the text as an element in the structure of haiga, and the text as painting. We analyse, in brief, the most important Japanese artists of the classical, modern and contemporary periods. The second part of the paper shows the ways in which the haiga painting “emigrated” from its native land to the Western cultural space, thanks to Western exhibitions, museums, galleries, haiku publications, universities, colleges, schools, and studios of artists. We also reveal the manner in which it has been assimilated by Western artists since 1980, its characteristics in the West at the beginning of the 21st century, the creative potential of this art, the guide marks of its mental, visual and emotional seduction that contributed to the presence of this art in the activity of certain painters in the U.S.A., France, Australia, Romania, and Croatia. The appearance of haiga in the West also meant changes in its techniques, when the artists began to use this art as a means to further the exploration of their creativity. Starting with the results of the Western painters' experiments the paper analyses them objectively and critically to see which of them are suitable for the spirit of haiga.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2014/B41/S13.017

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