The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing and assimilation. Today, anxiety about the growing power of China pervades sentiment, but until the late 19th century, admiration was widespread. The Middle Kingdom inspired fascination rather than fear.

Japanese artists were particularly prone to such passion, and their enthusiasm is the subject of an exhibition at the National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington DC, which runs until 15 September 2024. The show, Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, examines how Chinese themes and aesthetics have influenced Japanese creators between 1680 and 1980. It draws from a spectacular collection gifted by Mary and Cheney Cowles, which contains more than 250 artworks, from ceramics to paintings and calligraphy, 41 of which are on display in the show.

The galleries are straightforward to navigate. The number of objects is relatively small, so visitors never feel overwhelmed. Informative panels and short videos narrated by Frank Feltens, Curator of Japanese Art at the NMAA, offer insights into the historical and cultural context into which the pieces were made. A comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue, edited by Feltens and two collaborators, is in the last stages of production and will be issued this fall by Hirmer Publishers.

In Japan, artists who sought to emulate China and its arts were called “literati”, or “bunjin” (文人).  In the late 1600s, they established a movement called Nanga, literally “Southern painting” (南画), which lay outside the official artistic mainstream. It emerged in the Kansai region but gradually spread over the entire country

One thing that distinguished Nanga artists from those who belonged to other circles was the value they put on friendship, particularly when forged in a shared passion for Chinese art. They “built complex personal networks of peers and patrons that often spanned the Japanese archipelago and […] frequently transcended boundaries of class and status,” Feltens writes in the catalogue.

Another characteristic was their yearning for reclusion. On the surface, this appears contradictory, but the paradox is resolved when one realizes that the literati ideal of reclusion was intellectual rather than physical.  Few literati – if any—seriously contemplated withdrawing from mainstream society or spurning all human contact, but they found pleasure in virtual experiences of reclusion. They achieved this by depicting solitary figures in grandiose natural settings or admiring the same in the production of their peers. As Feltens explains, the “acts of painting and looking at paintings were major vehicles for enabling cognitive reclusion.” Scholar in Retirement, produced around 1750 by Ike Taiga (1723-1776), one of the leading literati of his days, illustrates this idea beautifully.

The context in which the Nanga movement appeared is particularly intriguing since, at the time, China was physically out of reach. Soon after it came to power in the early 1600s, the Tokugawa regime grew wary of Christianity and proselytizing Westerners. To minimize the perceived threat, it adopted a series of edicts, one of which called for a ban on foreign travel. Fully in place by 1639, these measures remained strictly enforced until the late 1860s.

Fortunately, alternatives existed, though none was perfect. One was to visit Nagasaki, the domestic centre of foreign trade and home to a relatively large Chinese community which, at times, numbered in the low thousands. Traders in the city sold a wide range of Chinese books, from treatises on painting to popular novels, along with artworks. Professional painters from the mainland also made an appearance from time to time. One of the best known was Shen Chuan (1682-1750), known locally as Chen Nanpin, who remained in the city for two years between 1731 and 1733. Monks, some of whom had artistic training which they shared with local artists, also visited regularly. Although Nagasaki was a small and restricted window on the Middle Kingdom, it offered ample resources for Japanese sinophiles to dream up an imaginary China.

Unsurprisingly, their creations had little to do with reality: “fantasy and imagination superseded actuality and accuracy in the Japanese presentation of China,” Feltens writes in the catalogue’s introductory essay. And since that fictitious country was untethered from historical reality, it had peculiar effects. Feltens points out that some “paintings by artists whose lives and achievements had relatively minor impact in their native China, and who had largely been forgotten there, gained seminal status in Japan.”  One example is Yi Fujiu, a merchant and horse trader, but one who yielded the brush with some skill. In the first half of the 18th century, he visited Nagasaki several times, staying at least a year on each occasion. Ike Taiga, who sought to acquire his work, greatly admired his simple, almost naive style.

Artists drawn to the literati aesthetics often hailed from families with some sort of intellectual connection with China. Gion Nankai (1676-1751) for instance, a poet who penned verses in Chinese and a pioneer Nanga artist, was the son of a physician, a profession that required an ability to read the medical literature from the mainland. Tanomura Chikuden (1777-1835), also the scion of a family of doctors, had hoped to become a confucian scholar before turning to painting. Ike Taiga, who produced Scholar in Retirement mentioned above, received training at a Kyoto temple steeped in Chinese culture.

The opening of Japan in the 1850s and the lifting of the prohibition against foreign travel in 1866 upended the manner in which Japanese artists related to China. For Ike Taiga and his contemporaries, China had been an idea. It was now also a real country which anyone was free to visit.

One who took full advantage of these new circumstances was Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883-1945), the son of a teacher of Confucian studies with an extensive network of friends in the Chinese diaspora. Born in Kobe, Kansetsu first traveled to China during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war, but returned dozens of times in succeeding years. He was widely known for his deep knowledge of the country’s culture, which he frequently depicted in his work. One example is Lu Yu Brewing Tea with Mountain Water, an imaginary representation of the 8th century author of the Classic of Tea.

The years that followed the fall of the Qing Dynasty were difficult. China entered a period of turbulence often exacerbated by Japanese predatory policies. In a perverse twist of logic, Paul Berry writes in the catalogue, some artists, Kansetsu among them, fell for supporting Japan’s military goals, from the 1931 invasion of Manchuria to the full-blown assault on the rest of the country six years later, “under the illusory belief that they could ‘save’ China from itself.”  Blinded by a specious idea, they lost sight of the humanity they shared with the creators of the stirring artworks they admired and which had inspired their literati forebears.  It was a costly mistake which destroyed the China they purported to love.

Martin Laflamme is a Canadian Foreign Service Officer who has served in Tokyo, Beijing (twice) and Kandahar. He is currently posted to Taipei.