8.1 Materials, Processes, and Techniques in South, East, and Southeast Asian Art

South, East and Southeast Asia have some of the world's oldest art traditions: some of the earliest known pottery comes from China and Japan. Many techniques and forms you will meet in this unit started here, including porcelain, ink painting in black and gray, the pagoda (a tiered tower), the dry rock garden and the color woodblock print.

A few habits help you recognize works from this region. In India and Southeast Asia, many temples and cave shrines are cut straight into rock or stacked from stone, while East Asian buildings, like Todai-ji and the Forbidden City, are timber frames under heavy tiled roofs. Painters tend to define shapes with crisp lines rather than shadows. Chinese scholars prized beautiful brush writing even more than painting. Decorative arts often carry flowers, birds and animals.

Gold and jade crown (Three Kingdoms period, Silla Kingdom, Korea; fifth to sixth century CE; metalwork). Silla rulers were buried in wooden chambers under huge mounds of stones and earth near their capital, Gyeongju, which kept robbers out. Goldsmiths cut this crown from thin sheet gold: a band with upright branches shaped like trees, and antler-like shapes, hung with comma-shaped jade pieces (gogok) and dozens of small gold disks that would tremble and flash with every movement. Many scholars link the trees and antlers to shamanism shared with peoples of the Central Asian steppe. The gold is so thin that the crown may have been made for ceremonies or burial rather than daily wear.

The David Vases (Yuan Dynasty, China; 1351 CE; white porcelain with cobalt-blue underglaze). Porcelain is made of fine white clay (kaolin) and porcelain stone, fired at very high heat until it turns hard, glassy and white. Potters at Jingdezhen painted dragons, phoenixes and flowers in cobalt blue on the unfired vases, covered them in clear glaze, and fired them once. The cobalt came from Iran, traded across the Mongol empire. A painted inscription records that a man named Zhang Wenjin gave the pair to a Daoist temple in 1351, asking for blessings on his family. That date makes them the most famous dated early blue-and-white porcelain, a yardstick for dating others. They are named for Sir Percival David, a collector who reunited them; they are now shown at the British Museum.

Portrait of Sin Sukju (1417–1475) (Imperial Bureau of Painting; c. 15th century CE; hanging scroll, ink and color on silk). Sin Sukju was a leading scholar-official of Korea's Joseon dynasty, who helped King Sejong develop hangul, the Korean alphabet. The state honored loyal officials as "meritorious subjects" and had court painters record them. He sits in a green official robe with an embroidered rank badge of birds on his chest and a black winged hat. Fine lines describe the face and robe with little shading. In Confucian thought a portrait should show a person's character, so the steady, dignified pose matters as much as the likeness. His family kept it for ancestral rites.

White and Red Plum Blossoms (Ogata Korin; c. 1710–1716 CE; ink, watercolor, and gold leaf on paper). This is a pair of two-panel folding screens, movable walls that also decorated rooms. A white plum tree leans in from the left screen and a red plum from the right, with a stylized stream swelling between them. Korin, from a wealthy Kyoto textile family, became the leading artist of the Rinpa school, known for bold, flat, decorative design. He used tarashikomi on the tree trunks: dropping ink or color onto a still-wet layer so it pools into soft, mottled patches. The stream's swirling pattern is flat and repeating, almost like fabric, and its dark color probably comes from silver that has tarnished.

Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Katsushika Hokusai; 1830–1833 CE; polychrome woodblock print, ink and color on paper). A giant wave curls over three boats of rowers, and tiny Mount Fuji sits in the trough below, so the mountain looks as small as a wave.

A woodblock print is a team effort. A publisher paid for the series, Hokusai drew the design, a carver cut one wooden block for each color, and printers inked the blocks and pressed paper onto them by hand. The blocks could print thousands of copies, so ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") were cheap enough for ordinary townspeople. Fuji views sold well because the sacred mountain was a popular pilgrimage goal. The series was such a hit that it grew to 46 prints.

Hokusai also borrowed from Europe: a low horizon and deep space from Western prints, and Prussian blue, a new imported synthetic pigment. In turn, after Japan opened to wider trade in the 1850s, prints like this inspired European artists such as Monet, Van Gogh and Mary Cassatt.