Shijo Prints: Japanese Expressionism

Shijo Style Surimono

Some flavors have an immediate appeal, such as the sweet faces of children in ukiyo-e; others are acquired tastes, and require repeated experience until the senses learn to appreciate the subtleties of the flavor.

Love at Second Sight

For most collectors, Shijo prints are of the latter variety. My first sighting of a Shijo print was in Holloway's "Graphic Art of Japan", and what he termed the "classical school" seemed to me like nothing other than a monstrosity.

Strange Drawings

The figures were misshapen as though they had some sort of congenital defect, the landscapes scrawled like a three-year-old's, the compositions off-center and amateurish, and even the animals appeared as though they were malformed and hideous. What was "classical" about this? What was appealing about it? Faces composed of two dots and a slit - or worse yet that asterisk used to represent an old, puckered mouth - cartoonish bodies with arms and legs of the wrong size splaying out at impossible angles - who could like this sort of thing?

Of course, looking back on my youthful impressions of Shijo artistry, I find it hard to believe how naive I was, how blind I was to what these incredible, deep-feeling artists were doing. But then, I had not been versed yet in those forms of art that took the capturing of the inner nature of the subject, subjectively experienced, over its external appearance, as the object of representation.

Kawamura Bumpo

For me, like many, it was Kawamura Bumpo, with his expressionistic but ever-appealing designs, who helped my eyes to make the transition and learn to appreciate the simplified, abstracted design. From there, I simply could not get enough. Far more than ukiyo-e artists, each Shijo designer I discovered in picture books and surimono had his own individualistic approach to representation, from the scratchy effect of Baitei to the cool asymmetry of Gessho.

Even the same artist might greatly vary his approach according to the composition, as with Bumpo's masterful use of negative space to represent a snowy mountain on one page, and intentionally busy composition to represent a plum grove in bloom on the next.

While ukiyo-e makes for easy viewing in an ever familiar medium, with bright colors and pleasing designs for their own sake, each Shijo print is a fresh challenge, requiring the viewer to understand the artist's composition, medium, use of colors and line.

Origins of Shijo

The origins of Shijo are closely linked with haikai (haiku) poetry, with the artist/poet Buson and his disciple Goshun, purported founder of the Shijo style, and I would advise anyone approaching Shijo for the first time to read early haikai, in order to get a feel for its aesthetic.

Like haikai, Shijo attempts to capture an immediate, subjective - one might even say expressionistic - reaction to a stimulus from the world of nature and man, frequently containing an insight and depth of impression within a fine detail. Naturalism, the sensory impression taken of the surface of an object, is eschewed for the psychological impression taken from it, resulting in the meeting of external and internal worlds in abstraction and stylization.

As in haikai, simplification, the reduction of a scene to its most basic signifying elements, is at the core of Shijo work. At the same time, the emphasis of Shijo is on the "real world", the ordinary experiences of daily life, without powder or rouge. Roughness is not rejected, polished up or reworked, but rather maintained as it is, in its real world presence, and transformed to elegance only through its use, as a modern sculptor might create something beautiful of rusted tin cans.

When my untutored mind saw the square heads of Suiseki for the first time, for example, I rejected them as unappealing and cruel to ordinary humanity; now I realize that these figures have a wonderful astringent strength that is far truer to the nature of the people represented than the most flattering portraits in ukiyo-e. If the ukiyo-e style is about fantasy and ideals, shijo is about the world as it is, as experienced day in and day out. In this too, it has close links to haikai.

Shijo - Under-Appreciated

My impression is that Shijo is still an under-appreciated cul-de-sac within Japanese prints and painting in the West, and that the austere, asymmetrical, abstracted and stylized generally loses out in popularity to the rosy, elegant and idealized images of popular figures and subjects. But for those who know how to look at Shijo work and appreciate it, the pickings are still plentiful, and the tart flavors all the more enjoyable for the knowledge that one is in a largely unexplored part of the orchard, with many opportunities for new discoveries.

Dan McKee

The author, Dan McKee is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Japanese literature program at Cornell University, NY.  He has a Master of the Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University, as well as an M.A. from Cornell.

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