Zenga ( Jap. 禅 画 'painting [in the spirit of] Zen' ) is a Japanese painting style associated with the practice of Zen Buddhism . Most often they are engaged in the monks, his greatest flourishing came in the Edo period [1] .
The use of the term is limited, as a rule, to the painting created in this epoch, which is not entirely accurate, since similar paintings were created earlier [2] . The religious significance of Buddhism declined during the Edo period, but monks, especially Zen, still played an important role, especially among artists and writers. Their paintings and calligraphy works, called zenga, created as an aid for meditation or as a form of spiritual exercise, were very popular then. One of the main artists in the style of zeng were [3] and Sengai [2] . In the Meiji Dzeng period , as well as the painting of the Nanga writers, it did not undergo major changes. Their highest goal, which is to draw attention primarily to the individual expression of the artist, interacts with the ideas of Western art that were influential in Japan at that time, although their medium remained traditional. Zenga continued to be practiced among monks and Zen practitioners, but it constantly made an impact on contemporary art. An important artist of this period was Zen master [4] .
These metaphorical or allusion images, as a rule, are made in ink, often accompanied by calligraphy , formally, rather naively and abstractly [1] , sometimes even caricaturely [5] . Their main goal was to convey the Zen ideals in the simplest and most direct way - an example could be the Enso circle, drawn in one movement of the brush [5] . Although ideally, zenga should be painted spontaneously, outside of any canons and conventions, as an individual expression of the overflow of the Zen spirit [5] , they were often created by professional artists commissioned by temples [2] . Monks-artists often created them also as a gift for visitors [3] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 Zenga // Kultura Japonii. Słownik. - Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne , 1996. - P. 351. - ISBN 83-02-06378-9 .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 William E. Deal. Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. - Oxford University Press, 2006. - P. 294. - ISBN 978-0-19-533126-4 .
- ↑ 1 2 Mason, 2005 , p. 325, s. 325.
- ↑ Mason, 2005 , S. 361, s. 361.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Idea i tusz. Malarstwo w kręgu buddyzmu chan / zen. - Prószyński i S-ka , 2002. - P. 91. - ISBN 83-7255-119-7 .
Literature
- Penelope Mason. History of Japanese art: [ eng ] . - Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. - ISBN 0131176013 .