080085 PS Case Study I: Landscape Painting in Asia (2014W)

The visual representation of landscape displays a great variety of stylistic, conceptional and philosophical developments in the art of Asia.
While landscape painting in South Asia became only popular as a distinct subject by the influence of Western artists in the 18th century, the sophisticated visualization of landscape has always been considered the most prestigious genre in East Asian art. Since the Song dynasty, landscape painting in China has been intended not so much to be an anatomy of nature and a real topography, but it can rather be seen as a spiritual and visual narration of legends and poems. Especially the depiction of mountains as sacred places and the homes of immortals, close to heaven, became a favorite subject and a major achievement of the Taoist movement in Chinese culture.
Japanese art initially imitated this Chinese manner, but rather in order to provide the setting for a narrative scene. This was still the case in the 16th century, when the ukiyo-e style concentrated on the human figure, and only changed in the the 18th century with the famous landscape painting from Hokusai and Hiroshige.
In India, landscape painting as a independent genre only developed through the influence of British painters under the patronage of the East India Company who engaged Indian artists from the Mogul court and supported an authentic and perspectively correct image of the nature. At the end of the 19th century, Japanese landscape and ink drawings stimulated the Indians to abandon the British academic manner and to create a new, so called pan-Asiatic style as an expression of the independence movement.