Contemporary Aesthetics (Jan 2013)
Perspectives East and West
Abstract
The object of this paper is to elucidate the sense of space peculiar to Japanese sensibility. To accomplish this task I consult not only paintings but also waka, distinctively Japanese poetry. I also compare the structures of Japanese and Western perspective in order to highlight the distinctive features of the Japanese sense of space. In China and Japan, traditional landscape painting was called sansui painting, literally, painting of “mountains and waters,” unlike fūkei painting, which is a modern adaptation of the Western notion of landscape. Landscape as sansui is characterized by its vitalistic conception: the cosmic space is filled with ki, a vital and spiritual element. This view is reflected in the Japanese notion of keshiki (literally, color of ki), another word meaning landscape, to which I pay particular attention because it is a vernacular word and expresses the genuine Japanese sense of space, differentiated even from the Chinese perspective found in Sansui paintings. Such a space as keshiki was to be felt rather than seen. The notion of the picturesque was associated in Japan with a spatial extent. It is a concept closely related to a humid climate that produces much fog or haze. A typical description is found in the Tale of Genji. It is in waka, from the thirteenth century, that we find the first expression of Japanese perspective, which consists the combination of a tactile, sometimes auditory close range with the visual, distant range, yet without a middle range (which is obscured by fog). This is very different from Western geometrical perspective, which is essentially constituted by the middle range relating the close continuously to the distant. In painting, this Japanese perspective was realized for the first time in ukiyo-e, particularly in the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige. I assume that this composition was transplanted to the Western world during the fashion for “japonisme,” and now determines the basic composition of the landscape photograph.
