'If you want a real painting, you must come to see me. If it's only a drawing you're after, you should try Okyo," the artist Soga Shohaku famously joked about Maruyama Okyo (1733-95), a renowned practitioner of Western modes of representation.
Realism in Japanese art has occasionally met with such resistance, as the style was considered nothing more than the mechanical copying of the natural world, and therefore bereft of "inner spirit." But Shohaku's criticism was contrived -- for while realism is, at its least, a relatively faithful painted record of things in the world, it can also be much more than that. The issue is presented in the Nara Prefectural Museum's "Okyo and Rosetsu," now in the second of two stagings of exhibited works that shows till Dec. 3.
By introducing realism to Kyoto painting circles, Okyo was breaking from the past. But rather than slavish fidelity to depicting the world in the way an anatomical book might do, he was synthesizing an array of Japanese, Chinese and Western traditions. Not simply an imitator of Western methods, he turned to neither the West's mediums, such as oil paint, nor to the West's typical subject matter.