WEEK 15: ASIAN ARTS

HISTORY OF ASIAN ARTS

 When ancient civilizations in Asia flourished, trade become a very important activity. In trading relationship
Asian countries started sharing culture and belief system.

 China, being one of the oldest civilizations in Asia, it has a rich history when it comes to culture and arts.

 Japan, they were influenced by China in terms of arts. Later on, they opened themselves to the western
world which they allow fusion of East and West.

 Philippine arts was a product of several periods in history spanning from the pre-colonial period to the
contemporary times.
 Chinese also had interactions with Western missionaries who came from India and it brought some of the
Indian influences to china.
 And because of this, Indian models inspired a lot of Chinese artists for few centuries.

 Most paintings were done in Monumental styles

- Wherein rocks and Mountings served as a barrier that made the viewer distracted initially from the main
subject of the work.

 Western landscapes
- usually had a single vanishing point while

 Chinese paintings
- Had the opposite since most paintings aimed to give the audience a perspective on the subject.

 Porcelain such as vases and jars

- is one of the commonly used as decorative ornaments. Some artifacts show intricate works of the Chinese in
these porcelain vases. It has attribution to the tradition of passing down the artistry from one generation to
the next. Just like Chinese artworks, the focal point in these vases depicts a central theme: Nature. They
believe that man is an integral part of nature ensuring that there is a certain balance in it.

 the common overarching themes of Chinese artworks

- everyday activities
- war
- Violence
- Death
- Nature
- Also noted that Chinese artworks are infused with a lot of symbolisms.

It is customary for the ancient Chinese people to show respect for their ancestors and Relatives. From a Western
point of view, Chinese can be mistaken for as that of worshipping gods. Most of the ancient Chinese were placed in
either gold or bronze vessels, depending on their social status
 BUDDIST ART

- Originated in India subcontinent in the centuries following the life of historical Gautama Buddha in 6th to 5th
century BCE.
- It developed to the North though Central Asia into Eastern Asia to form the Northern branch of Buddhist art,
and to the east as far as Southeast Asia to form the southern branch of Buddhist art.
- Buddhist art traveled with believers as the dharma spread, adapted and evolved in each new host country.
- Buddhist art flourished and even influenced the development of Hindu art, until Buddhism nearly
disappeared in India around 10th century CE due in part to the vigorous expansion of

A common visual design in Buddhist art is the Mandala.

It represents schematically the ideal universe.

- In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing

attention of aspirants and adepts, a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing
a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction.

- Its symbolic nature can help one “to access progressively deeper levels of
the unconscious, ultimately assisting the mediator to experience a mystical sense of oneness

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as “A

representation of the center of unconscious self”, and
believe his painting of mandalas enabled him to identify
emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in
personality.

BUTHANESE ART

 Similar to the art of Tibet. Both are based upon Vajrayana Buddhism, with its pantheon of divine beings.

 Each divine id assigned special shapes, color, and identifying objects, such as lotus, conch-shell, thunderbolt,
and the begging bowl.

 All images are made to exact specification that have remained remarkably unchanged for centuries.

VAJRAYANA

BUDDHISM

ART OF TIBET
The major orders of Buddhism in Bhutan are Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma.

 The Drukpa Kagyu is a former branch of the Kagyu School.

 It is known for paintings documenting the lineage of Buddhist masters and the 70 Je Khenpo

 The Nyingma order is known for images of Padmasambhava, who is credited with introducing Buddhism into
Bhutan in the 7th century.
 According to the legend, Padmasambhava hid a scared treasures for the future Buddhist masters, especially
Pema Lingpa, to find.
 The treasure finders (Tertön) are also fluent subjects to Nyingma art.

PEMA LINGPA

 Bhutanese art is particularly rich in bronzes of different kinds that are collectively known by the name Kham-
so.

 Wall paintings and sculptures are formulated on the principal ageless ideas of Buddhist art form.

 Their emphasis on detail is derived from Tibetan models, their origins can be discerned easily, despite the
profusely embroidered garments and glittering ornaments which these figures are lavishly covered.

 The arts and craft of Bhutan that represents the exclusive “spirit and identity of the Himalayan kingdom” is
defined as the art of Zorig Chosum, which means the “Thirteen arts and crafts of Bhutan”
 The thirteen crafts are carpentry, painting, paper making, blacksmithery, weaving, sculpturing , and many
other crafts.
 Bhutanese rural life is also displayed in the ‘Folk Heritage Museum’ in Thimphu. There is also a ‘Voluntary
Artist Studio’ in Thimphu to encourage and promote the art forms among the youth of Thimphu.
 CAMBODIAN ART

- Cambodia's history, religious principles guided and inspired its arts.

- A unique Khmer style emerged from the combination of indigenous animistic beliefs and the originally Indian
religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
- Cambodian culture also absorbed elements from Japanese, Chinese, Lao and Thai cultures.
- Music, dance, theatre and cinema flowed strongly through the blood of the Cambodian people.

Visual Arts of Cambodia

- Cambodia, arts and crafts were generally produced by skilled artists.

- Traditional Cambodian arts and crafts include textiles, non-textile weaving, silversmithing, stone carving,
lacquer ware, ceramics, wat murals, and kite-making.
- The Khmer art has roots from the Angkor period. Massive temples from this period, including Angkor Wat
and the Bayon at Angkor Thom, testify to the power of Angkor and the grandeur of its architecture and
decorative art.

WAT MURALS

Best known surviving murals are the Silver Pagoda in Phnom Penh TEXTILES SILKPIDAN

SILVER GOLD-SMITHING

Lotus-shaped Cambodian bowl (gold and silver alloy) STONE CARVING AT BANTEAY SREI

Stone bas-relief at Bayon temple depicting the Khmer army at war with the
Cham
 CHINESE ART

 Chinese Art has varied throughout its ancient history, divided into periods by the ruling dynasties of China
and changing technology.

 Different forms of art have been influenced by great philosophers, teachers, religious figures and even
political leaders.

 Chinese art encompasses fine arts, folk arts and performance arts.

SONG DINASTY

 Particularly noted for the great artistic achievements that it encouraged and, in part, subsidized.

 PAINTING

 A landscape paintings, with a blurred outlines and

mountain contours which means distance through an
impressionistic treatment of natural phenomena.
 New style of painting that employed calligraphic
brushwork for self-expressive ends.
 Under, Yuan Dynasty is a painting by Zhao Mengfu,
greatly influenced laper chinese landscape painting.

 CHINESE OPERA
 Under, Song Dynasty developed the oldest extant form of
chinese opera called Kunqu.

 Under, Yuan Dynasty opera became a variant of opera which

continues today as Cantonese.

 POETRY
 Ci known as lyric poetry which means expressed feelings of desire.
 Many of its prime proponents were female poets, such as Li
Qingzhao. Su Shi was another prominent Song poet famous for
writing in the ci form.
 INDIAN ART

Indian art can be classified into specific periods, which is:

1. Hinduism and Buddhism of the ancient period

(3500 BCE-present)

2. Islamic ascendancy (712-1757 CE)

3. The colonial period (1757-1947)

4. Independence and the postcolonial period (posr-1947)

5. ModernWala and Postmodern art in India

CARVED PILLARS OF
ELLORA, MAHARASHTRA

FRESCOES OF AJANTA AND ELLORA CAVES RANGOLI

THE VISUAL ARTS

 are tightly interrelated with non-visual arts.

 According to Kapali Vatsyayan,"Classical Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music and
dancing evolved their own rules conditioned by their respective media, but the way shared with one another
of not only the underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian ancient religio-philosophic mind, but also the
procedures by which the relationships of the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail.
 INDONESIAN ART
 Art and culture has been shaped by long interaction between original; indigenous custom and multiple
foreign influences.
 Indonesia routes between Far East and Middle East, resulting to many cultural practice, strongly influenced
by a multitude religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam.
 Indonesia is not generally known for paintings, aside from the intricate and expressive Balinese painting
which often express natural scence and themes from the traditional dances.

KENYAH DAYAK LONGHOUSE IN EAST KALIMANTAN’S APO

 Indigenous kenyah paint design based on, as commonly found among Austronesian cultures, endemic
natural motifs such as ferns, trees, dog, hornbills and human figures.
 Indonesia has long-he bronze and Iron ages
 8th - 10th century both as stand-alone works of art and also incorporated into temples
 Most notable are the hundreds of meters of relief sculpture at the temple of Borobudur in central Java. It
tells the story of the life of Buddha and illustrate his teachings. The temple was originally home to 504
statues of the seated buddha.

BOROBUDUR TEMPLE

QUR’AN

 Calligraphy based on Qur’an, used as decoration as Islam

forbids naturalistic depictions.
  Modern Indonesia painters use a wide variety of style and themes.

BALINESE ART

 Art of Hindu- Javanese origin that grew from the work of artisans of the Majapahit Kingdon, with their
expansion to Bali in the late 13th Century.
 From the 16th until the 20th centuries the village of Kamasan, Klungkung (East Bali) was the center of
classical Balinese Art.
 During the 1st Part of the 20th century, new varieties are of Balinese art developed.
 Late 20th century, Ubud and it’s neighboring villages established a reputation or as the center of Balinese
art.

Traditional Balinese painting: Cockfighting by Ketut Ginarsa

 Ubud and Batuan known for their paintings.

Batubulan for their stone carvings.

Master for their woodcarvings.

“ a highly developed. Although informal Baroque folk art that combines the peasant liveliness with the
refinement of classicism of Hinduistic Java, but free toof the conservative prejudice and with a new vitality
fired by the exubernace of the democratic spirit of the tropical primitive.”- Covarubbias

Balinese art is actually carved, painted, woven, and prepared into objects intended for everyday use rather
than as object d’art. –Eiseman

in the 1920s, the arrival of the western artist had a very little influence on the Balinese until the post WWII
Period although there are some accounts over emphasize by the western presence at the expense of
recognizing Balinese creativity.

Avant-garde artists such as:

WALTER SPIES ADRIEN JEAN LE MAYEUR ARIE SMIT DONALD FRIEND

 Balinese artists incorporated aspects of perspective and anatomy of these artist.

JAPANESE ART

 Art in Japan has undergone series of transitions and periodization.

 Japan has transitioned into a cultural mixing pot.
 Based on artifact such as ceramic figures and ornaments.
 It was influenced by Korean and Chinese artworks.
 It covers from sometime 10th millenium BC to the present.
 It covers a wide range of art styles and media and a myriad of other types of works of art form the ancient
times until the contemporary 21st century.

HANIWA

Ceramic figures that is made up of clay. That were made for ritual use
and buried with the dead as funerary objects.

Shinoism

 The native religion of Japan.

BUDDHISM
 Became an integral part of Japanese Culture, Artworks such as images and sculptures of Buddha were
produced. Buddhist temples also became staples in key places. Art in essence became an expression of
worship for the Japanese.

UKIYO-E
 Is an art movement which is flourished 17th through 19th Centuries. It’s artist produced woodblock prints
and paintings of such subjects as travel scenes and landscapes, female beauties, & sumo wrestlers.

THE GREAT WAVE OF KANAGAWA HIROSHIGE SHARAKU

BY HOKUSAI

BY AYAME NO SIKKU

SECOND HALF OF 17TH CENTURY

They originate single color works of Hishikawa Moronobu

 Suzuki Harunobu developed the technique of polychrome printing to produce nishiki-e

- Woman visiting the shrine in the night.

Nishiki –e
 Is a type of Japanese multi-colored woodblock printing. The technique is used primarily in Ukiyo-e. It was
invented in 1760s.
Japanese Painting (Kaiga)
 Is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese arts.

 Simple stick figures and geometric designs on Jomon Period pottery and Yayoi
period.

 Mural paintings with both geometric and figurative designs have been found in
Kofun period.
 KOREAN ART

 Korean art is noted for its traditions in pottery, music calligraphy, painting, sculpture and other genres, often
marked by the use of bold color, natural forms, precise shape and scale and surface decoration.
 The study and appreciation of Korean art is still at a formative stage in west. An art given birth to and
developed by a nation is its own art
 The history of Korean painting is dated to approximately 108 C.E.
 Korean painting has been a constant separation of monochromatic works of black
 brushwork on very often mulberry paper or silky; The colorful folk art or min-hwa , ritual arts , tomb
paintings , and festival arts.

Min-hwa

(Korean Folkart)

Flowers and bird

by Kimsingu

KoguryoTombs

(Tomb Paintings)

Body Art (Festival art)

Self-portrait of Ko hui-dong (1886-1965)

Self-portraits impart an understanding of medium

that extends well beyond the affirmation of stylistic
and cultural difference.

EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

 The decision to paint using oil and canvas in korea had two different
interpretations.
 One is being a sense of enlightenment due western ideas and art style. This enlightenment derived from
intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
 Ko had been painting with this method during period of Japan's annexation of korea.
 He state “ While I was in Tokyo, a very curious thing happened.at that time there were fewer that one
hundred Korean students in Tokyo. All of us were drinking the new air and embarking on new studies, but
there were some who mooched my choice to study art. A close friend said that it was not right for me to
study painting in such a time as this.”
 Korean pottery was recognized as early as 6000 BCE. This pottery was also referred to as comb-patterned
pottery due to the decorative lines carved into the outside.
 Early Korean societies were mainly dependent on fishing.
-East coast have a flat base.
-South coast have a round base

LAOTIAN ART
 Laotian art includes ceramic, lao Buddhist sculpture, and lao music.
 Lao Buddhist sculptures were created in large variety of material including gold, silver and most often
bronze.
 Brick-and-mortal also was a medium used for colossal images, a famous of these is the image of Phya Avat
(16th century) in Vientiane, although a renovation completely altered the appearance of the sculpture, and it
no longer resembles a lao Buddha.
 Wood is popular for small votive Buddhist images that are often left in canvas it is also very common for
large, life-size standing images of Buddha.

 Phra Keo (the emerald Buddha)

 Phra Phuttha Butsavarat

 The phra phuttha butsavarat, like the phra keo is also enshrined in its own chapel at the grand palace in
bangkonk.

NEPALESE ART
- The ancient and refined traditional culture of Kathmandu, for that matter in the whole of Nepal, is an
uninterrupted and exceptional meeting of the Hindu and Buddhist ethos practiced by its highly religious
people.
- It has also embrace in its fold cultural diversity provided by the other religions such as Jainism, Islam and
Christianity.

Traditional Culture of Kathmandu

THAI ART

- Traditional Thai art is primarily composed of Buddhist art, which in turn often has Hindu elements and
iconography in it.
- Traditional Thai sculpture almost exclusively depicts images of the Buddha. Traditional Thai paintings usually
consist of book illustrations, and painted ornamentation of buildings such as palaces and temples.
- Traditional Thai paintings showed subjects in two dimensions without perspective.
- The size of each element in the picture reflected its degree of importance.
- The primary technique of composition is that of apportioning areas
- This eliminated the intermediate ground, which would otherwise imply perspective.
- Perspective was introduced only as a result of Western influence in the mid-19th century.
- Thailand normally depicts religious themes, most often the Jataka stories ,Buddha’s life story and stories of
his previous incarnations, which often present visual explanations of various Buddhist principles the Buddhist
heavens and hells, and scenes of daily life.
-
The Sukhothai kingdom
- Buddha images of the Sukhothai
period are elegant, with sinuous
bodies and slender, oval faces
- This period saw the introduction
of the “walking Buddha post”

Sukhothai artists in the 14th century tried to follow the canonical defining marks of a Buddha, as they are set out
in ancient Pali texts:

- Skin so smooth that dust cannot stick to it

- Legs like a deer
- Thighs like a banyan tree
- Shoulders as massive as an elephant's head;
- Arms round like an elephant's trunk, and long enough to touch the knees
- Hands like lotuses about to
- Fingertips turned back like petals
- head like an egg;
- Hair like scorpion stingers
- Chin like a mango stone
- Nose like a parrot's beak
- Earlobes lengthened by the earrings of royalty
- Eyelashes like a cow's
- Eyebrows like drawn bows.

TIBETAN ART

- Lamaism, branch of Vajrayana Tantric, or Esoteric Buddhism that evolved from the 7th century CE in Tibet.
- It is based mainly on the rigorous intellectual disciplines of Madhyamika and Yogachara philosophy and
utilizes the Tantric ritual practices that developed in Central Asia and particularly in Tibet.
- Tibetan Buddhism also incorporates the monastic disciplines of early Theravada Buddhism and the
shamanistic features of the indigenous
- Tibetan religion, Bon. Tibetan art is primarily sacred art, drawing elements from the religions of Buddhism,
Hinduism, Bon, and various tribal groups, and reflecting the over-riding influence of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Sand Mandala or “Kalachakra mandala”

 Sand Mandala is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of mandalas made from
coloured sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically dismantled once it has been completed and its accompanying
ceremonies and viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of
material life.

 Tibetan Buddhism contains Tantric Buddhism, Also known as Vajrayana Buddhism for its common synbolism
of the vajra, The diamond thunderbolt known in Tibetan as the dorje.

Vajrayana Buddhism
- (also known as Tantric Buddhism, Tantrayāna, Esoteric Buddhism, and the Diamond Vehicle) refers to a
family of Buddhist lineages found primarily in Tibet and Japan, which combine Mahayana ideals with a body
of esoteric knowledge and tantric practice.

Chorten (Tibetan stupa)

 VIETNAMESE ART
- Encompasses art created in Vietnam or by Vietnamese artists, from ancient times to the present.
- Vietnamese art has a long and rich history. Clay pottery of the Neolithic Age dates as far back as 8,000 B.C.E..
- Decorative elements from ceramics of the Bronze Age were used to ornament large, elaborately-incised
bronze cast drums of the Dong Son culture that flourished in North Vietnam (from about 1,000 B.C.E. to the
fourth century B.C.E.)
- Traditional Vietnamese art is art practiced in Vietnam or by Vietnamese artist, from ancient times including
the elaborate Dong Son drums to post-Chinese domination art which was strongly influenced by Chinese
Buddhist art, among other philosophies such as Taoism and Confucianism.

Dong Son Drums

THE NGUYEN DYNASTY, THE LAST RULLING DYNASTY OF VIETNAM

1802-1945, SAW A RENEWED INTEREST IN CERAMICS AND PORCELEIN ART

Ancient Architecture in Vietnamese

- Ly dynasty
- Ly dynasty opened the new change for architecture during
developing feudal state.
- Generally, Ly dynasty’s architecture was five orthodox styles:
citadels, palaces, castles, pagodas, and houses.
- It was influenced by Buddhism and served Buddhism.
- So Thang Long capital culture deeply mirrored characteristic of
the tower-pagoda.
- In 1031, there were 950 pagodas that built during King Ly Thai
Tong.

VIETNAMESE CALLIGRAPHY
- Calligraphy has had a long history in Vietnam, previously using Chinese characters along with chu nom.
- However , most modern Vietnamese calligraphy instead uses the Roman-character based Quoc Ngu, Which
has proven to be very popular.

Quốc ngữ

- A Lunar New Year banner written in Vietnamese calligraphy; the

Quốc ngữsyllables