Page 54 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

cat. 37
Ogawa Haritsu,
Writing-paper box and writing
box lüith dragonfly design,
second quarter of
eighteenth century, lacquer
on wood with makie,
writing-paper box: 12.7 x 40 x 30.8
3
(5 x i5 Ax 12 Vs);
writing box: 4.4 x 25.5 x 16.7
5
3
(l /4XIOX6 /8) ,
Agency for Cultural Affairs,
Tokyo
53

The beauty of cherry blossoms and the moon is enhanced by their fundamentally mutable nature.
Moreover, the power of cherry blossoms and the moon can be experienced not only through actual con-
tact, but perhaps even more strongly through the imagination or memory. According to Kenkô's aes-
thetics, a poem about cherry blossoms can be more deeply satisfying than seeing the blossoms directly.
Katsushika Ôi's Cherry Blossoms at Night (cat. 281) depicts a woman writing a poem. Her robe (furisode)
is decorated with a pattern of scattered cherry blossoms, and several branches of a cherry tree are illu-
minated in the middle distance against a starry night sky. But the picture is completed only in one's
imagination and thus gains its strength through the viewer's active engagement.
Finally, the transcendence of formal boundaries between media is apparent in most Japanese
art forms. For screen paintings a designer or painter and possibly a workshop execute the paintings,
while a papermaker, woodworker, lacquerers, and metalworkers fabricate the frame. Woodblock printing
involves a designer, calligrapher, block carver, colorist, printer, and so on. Multitudes of artisans are

needed to create a porcelain dish, from kiln construction to applying colored enamels. In addition,
many artists worked in more than one medium, as Ogata Kórin did in ceramics, lacquers, textiles, and
paintings (cats. 26, 28, 29,140).

T H E O R I G I N S Tsuji Nobuo has spent the last decade disseminating his revolutionary ideas on Japanese aesthetics
7
O F K A Z A R I based on the central concept of kazari — what he defines as "a will to decorate." Tsuji has brought to the
fore the importance of action and temporality in kazari, definitively separating it from its English equiv-
alents of decoration or ornament, both of which have come to be seen as secondary and static additions
to a work of art. The problems inherent in trying to translate such concepts as decoration into different