Last year was an excellent one for engaging Chinese art in western Japan. A series of exhibitions got underway with the airing of the Ueno Collection at the Kyoto National Museum in January, the superlative holdings of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art and the Sumitomo Collection housed at Sen-oku Hakuko-kan in Kyoto and exhibitions in other areas.
The final installment of the yearlong indulgence culminates at the Kyoto National Museum with "Modern Chinese Painting and Japan," which runs through Feb. 26. The show explores a re-orientation of the long-established line of cultural transmission from China to Japan. It is a culturally sensitive topic, but since the early 20th century, Japan began to point the way forward for Chinese painting.
The show gets underway with revised continuations of the traditions of Chinese literati, also known as Southern School of Chinese painting, in the works of the mid-19th century Shanghai School, a loosely affiliated group of individualist artists who gathered in the economically booming port city. Their stylistic lineage could be traced to the "Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou," the individualist painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, though an essential difference was that unlike the "eccentrics," the Shanghai School had money.
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