The Japanese Artists Bible: From Jōmon Clay to Superflat

A visual timeline of Japanese art

Read the ribbon from left to right. Each band is an era, and its width is a rough guide to how much the art of that period matters to collectors today, not to its length in years. Prehistory alone would fill the screen many times over.

The new Japonisme: lines from Edo to Superflat

In 1872 a French critic gave a name to Europe’s craze for Japanese prints. Today the traffic runs through anime, streetwear, toys, design and antiques at once, and the old and new are closer than they look. We call it the new Japonisme. Here are five lines you can follow across the centuries.

Bridge: for the bigger picture of Japan’s soft power, from subculture to antiques, read whatever happened to Cool Japan.

Clay and ritual: Jōmon and Kofun

The oldest Japanese art has no names attached. It was made by communities, and it survives because it was fired hard or buried deep.

Fourteen millennia back

The Jōmon period takes its name from the cord marks pressed into its pottery. Excavations at the Odai Yamamoto I site in Aomori in 1998 recovered forty-six plain fragments dated as early as 14,500 BCE. Later in the period came dogū, small human and animal figures in clay. They were made across Japan except Okinawa, mostly in the east, and stopped entirely in the following Yayoi period.

Haniwa and the burial mounds

From the 3rd to the 6th century, the great keyhole-shaped tombs of the Kofun period were ringed with haniwa, terracotta figures built up from coils of clay. Warriors, horses, houses and shrine maidens stood guard over the dead. Their simple, open faces are one reason modern designers keep borrowing them.

Temples, courts and ink

With Buddhism came workshops. From the 8th century onwards, the most important art in Japan was made for temples and the court by organised teams.

The Kei school of sculptors

The Kei school emerged in the early Kamakura period, around 1200, based in Nara. It came into its own when Kōkei and his son Unkei led it, and Unkei’s six sons and their descendants carried it on. Much of Nara had been destroyed in the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185, and the rebuilding gave these sculptors their commissions. It is the first great family business in Japanese art.

Sesshū and the ink revival

Sesshū Tōyō (about 1420 to 1506) was a Zen monk who travelled to China and came back to paint landscapes in ink with a force nobody in Japan had matched. He stands for the other pole of our story: the individual voice inside a monastery system.

The Kanō dynasty

The Kanō school was founded by the very long-lived Kanō Masanobu (1434 to 1530). It was the dominant style of painting from the late 15th century until the Meiji period began in 1868. By then the family had split into many branches, with large numbers of trained painters working under its name. If you want one example of Japanese art as an institution, this is it.

Edo: gold screens and the floating world

In 1603 Edo, now Tokyo, became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. Two and a half centuries of peace produced a city audience with money to spend, and art followed it.

Rinpa: a school that was named later

Rinpa began in 17th-century Kyoto with Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558 to 1637) and Tawaraya Sōtatsu. About fifty years later, the brothers Ogata Kōrin (1658 to 1716) and Ogata Kenzan (1663 to 1743) consolidated it. Kōrin’s Irises screens are registered National Treasures. The word Rinpa itself, built from the last syllable of Kōrin, was coined only in the Meiji period.

Ukiyo-e and its four-person system

Ukiyo-e means pictures of the floating world. The earliest works appeared in the 1670s with Hishikawa Moronobu’s paintings and black-and-white prints of beautiful women. Every print was a team effort: the artist designed it, a carver cut the blocks, a printer pressed them by hand, and a publisher financed, promoted and distributed the result.

Katsushika Hokusai Under the Wave off Kanagawa, colour woodblock print, 1830 to 1833
Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 1830 to 1833. Look closer: Mount Fuji is the small grey cone sitting inside the trough of the wave, framed by its claw-like spray. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1925.3245, CC0.

Hokusai, Utamaro and Sharaku

Katsushika Hokusai produced more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, prints and book illustrations, and helped turn ukiyo-e from portraits of courtesans and actors into a broad art of landscape and nature. Kitagawa Utamaro (about 1753 to 1806) made the large-headed portraits of women for which he is still known. Tōshūsai Sharaku is the great mystery: his career as a print designer lasted ten months in 1794 and 1795, and nobody knows his real name.

Toshusai Sharaku actors Ichikawa Omezo I and Otani Oniji III, woodblock print, 1794
Tōshūsai Sharaku, the actors Ichikawa Omezō I and Ōtani Oniji III, 1794. Look closer: the standing figure’s chequered robe is printed in bold blocks while the crouching actor below is all diagonals. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, 1934.239, CC0.
Kitagawa Utamaro Goldfish, Elegant Comparison of Little Treasures, woodblock print, about 1802
Kitagawa Utamaro, Goldfish, from the series Elegant Comparison of Little Treasures, about 1802. Look closer: the woman bends over the child at floor level, and the poem cartouche floats in the empty upper corner. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, 1961.210, CC0.

Hiroshige and the road

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858) is best known for his horizontal series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, the highway between Edo and Kyoto. His travellers, rain and snow did more than any other prints to shape the European idea of Japan.

Utagawa Hiroshige Mishima Morning Mist, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, woodblock print
Utagawa Hiroshige, Mishima: Morning Mist, from The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, about 1833 to 1834. Look closer: the shrine gate and the trees behind the travellers are printed in grey only, with no outline, so they seem to dissolve. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, 1932.170, CC0.

Jakuchū and the Kyoto individualists

Itō Jakuchū began his Colourful Realm of Living Beings in 1758, at the age of forty-two, as a memorial to his parents and youngest brother. His roosters and fish, painted in Kyoto by a lay Zen brother, show that Edo had room for obsessive loners as well as print factories.

Meiji and Taishō: East meets oil

The opening of Japan after 1858 sent prints west and oil paint east. Japonisme was first described by the French critic Philippe Burty in 1872, and Vincent van Gogh began collecting Japanese prints from 1885.

Nihonga and yōga

Both terms were coined in the Meiji period (1868 to 1912). Yōga meant Western-style painting, taught by figures such as Kuroda Seiki. Nihonga, pictures in a Japanese style, was championed by Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa as an answer. Keep that split in mind, because both Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami would later train in nihonga.

The last masters of ukiyo-e

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 to 1892) is widely called the last great master of ukiyo-e. Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847 to 1915) recorded the gas lamps, trains and harbours of a country rushing to modernise.

Kobayashi Kiyochika The Moon Beyond Shinagawa, woodblock print, 1884
Kobayashi Kiyochika, The Moon Beyond Shinagawa, 1884. Look closer: we see the full moon from inside a room, past a red curtain and a paper lantern, with boats far out on the bay. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, 1936.232, CC0.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing His Flute in the Moonlight, woodblock triptych
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing His Flute in the Moonlight, about 1883. Look closer: the robber crouching in the grass on the right never draws his sword, held back by the music. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, 1984.568, CC0.

Shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga

Here the workshop story splits in two. Shin-hanga, the new prints movement, was driven by the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō and flourished from about 1915 to 1942. It kept the old team of artist, carver, printer and publisher, and gave us Kawase Hasui and Hiroshi Yoshida. Sōsaku-hanga, creative prints, began with Yamamoto Kanae’s small print Fisherman in 1904, which he drew, carved and printed himself. Self-drawn, self-carved and self-printed became its creed.

Mavo and mingei

Mavo, founded in 1923 and led by Tomoyoshi Murayama, mixed performance, painting and architecture into anti-establishment provocation. Mingei went the other way. From the mid-1920s Yanagi Sōetsu, with the potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō, praised the beauty of ordinary craft by unnamed makers.

After 1945: the avant-garde

The postwar decades produced the groups that museums around the world now collect most eagerly.

Gutai

The Gutai Art Association was co-founded in 1954 by Jirō Yoshihara, who had settled in Ashiya, near Osaka. Under his guidance it staged outdoor exhibitions, performances and stage events. Kazuo Shiraga, also from 1954, painted with his feet, spreading oil paint across paper and later canvas.

Hi-Red Center and Mono-ha

Hi-Red Center was founded in May 1963 by Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jirō Takamatsu, who used Tokyo itself as a canvas for anti-establishment happenings. Mono-ha, the School of Things, emerged in Tokyo in the mid-1960s. Its turning point came in October 1968, when Nobuo Sekine dug a hole 2.7 metres deep in Kobe’s Suma Rikyu Park and compacted the earth into a cylinder of the same size, called Phase: Mother Earth.

Provoke and the camera

Provoke, a small-press photography magazine founded in 1968, set out to free photography from subservience to words. Daidō Moriyama joined from its second issue, and the grainy, blurred look it championed still shapes street photography.

Posters, psychedelia and chrome

In the 1960s graphic design became one of Japan’s most exciting art forms, and it fed straight into the pop work that sits on our shelves.

Tadanori Yokoo

Born in Nishiwaki, Hyōgo, in 1936, Yokoo began as a stage designer for the avant-garde theatre. He was included in the 1968 Word and Image exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the museum gave him a solo show of his graphics four years later.

Tadanori Yokoo Maneki Neko Lucky God silkscreen poster 1996, front
Tadanori Yokoo, Maneki Neko Lucky God, silkscreen poster, 1996. Look closer: the beckoning cat sits under a shrine gate against rising-sun rays, a 1960s Yokoo device still at work three decades on. Photograph: Japonista.

Keiichi Tanaami

Tanaami (1936 to 2024) worked from the 1960s as a graphic designer, illustrator, film-maker and painter. On his first trip to New York he saw Andy Warhol’s work, and he never forgot what it taught him.

Our full guide covers his goldfish, cranes and wartime memories: Keiichi Tanaami’s psychedelic pop. His collaborations also reached toy shelves, as with the BE@RBRICK Keiichi Tanaami 1000% in black.

Hajime Sorayama and Hiroshi Nagai

Hajime Sorayama, born in Imabari, Ehime, in 1947, calls his precise airbrush style superrealism and designed the original Sony Aibo robot dog. Hiroshi Nagai, born the same year in Tokushima, painted the pools and palm trees of 1980s city pop album covers. Read Sorayama’s chrome and airbrush and Hiroshi Nagai and city pop.

Heta-uma: badly drawn on purpose

Heta-uma, bad but good, began in the 1970s around the manga magazine Garo. Teruhiko Yumura, known as King Terry, made deliberately clumsy drawings with real knowingness. The idea runs straight through to Nara’s children and to much of the street art of today.

Superflat and the studio era

In the 1990s the workshop came back, openly, with a manifesto.

Takashi Murakami and Kaikai Kiki

Murakami studied at Tokyo University of the Arts, hoping to work in animation, but majored in nihonga and earned a doctorate in it in 1993. He invented his alter ego Mr. DOB, set up the Hiropon Factory, and in 2001 incorporated it as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., through which he manages other artists. Superflat was also the name of the exhibition he curated in 2000, which toured West Hollywood, Minneapolis and Seattle. In 2002 Marc Jacobs invited him to work with Louis Vuitton.

Takashi Murakami Shangri-La Pink hand-signed offset print with smiling flowers
Takashi Murakami, Shangri-La Pink, hand-signed offset print, edition of 300. Look closer: every flower has its own face, and a few in the field are crying rather than smiling. Photograph: Japonista.

Start with collecting Takashi Murakami, then his flowers and their formats and the Louis Vuitton years. The Shangri-La Pink print is on our Murakami and Kaikai Kiki shelf.

Mr. and Chiho Aoshima

The studio produced its own artists. Mr., born Masakatsu Iwamoto in 1969 and based in Saitama, is a former Murakami protégé who first exhibited in 1996 and paints anime-style children drawn from otaku culture. Chiho Aoshima, born in Tokyo in 1974, studied economics, taught herself Adobe Illustrator, and became one of the first three interns at Murakami’s studio.

Yoshitomo Nara

Nara was born in Hirosaki, Aomori, in 1959, studied at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, and spent 1988 to 1993 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His stubborn, sharp-eyed children came to the fore in the 1990s. Our guide is Yoshitomo Nara: life, work and collecting, and his pieces sit on the Yoshitomo Nara shelf.

Yayoi Kusama

Kusama grew up in Matsumoto in a family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm, and drew pumpkins as a schoolgirl. She studied nihonga in Kyoto for a year, then left for the United States in 1957, later saying she found Japanese society “too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women”. Her Infinity Nets paintings followed in New York.

Yayoi Kusama yellow and black Pumpkin object paperweight
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin object paperweight in yellow and black, about 9 cm. Look closer: the dots shrink as they climb the ribs towards the stalk, which carries its own smaller dots. Photograph: Japonista.

See Yayoi Kusama: life, work and collecting, the Pumpkin object and the Kusama shelf. For the three together, read Murakami, Kusama and Nara prints.

Streetwear, toys and the street

From the 1990s, Tokyo’s Harajuku turned clothing and toys into an art scene of their own.

NIGO and A Bathing Ape

NIGO, born Tomoaki Nagao in 1970, founded A Bathing Ape in 1993 with Hiroshi Fujiwara as his mentor. He launched Human Made in 2010, left BAPE in 2013 and now serves as artistic director of Kenzo. Read the BAPE empire and NIGO and Human Made, or browse the NIGO shelf and BAPE shelf.

BE@RBRICK, sofubi and the art toy

The first BE@RBRICK was given away on 27 May 2001 at the World Character Convention in Tokyo. The bear became a blank canvas for artists from Tanaami to KAWS. Follow BE@RBRICK’s story, KAWS and the repeating icon, and the shelves for BE@RBRICK and soft vinyl toys.

Rockin’Jelly Bean, Katsuya Terada and the illustrators

Rockin’Jelly Bean’s pin-up screen prints, including the Erostika and Erosty work, sit on our Erostika shelf, with the Frosty Pop screen print among them. Katsuya Terada, born in Tamano, Okayama, in 1963, calls himself the Doodle King and designed the characters for Blood: The Last Vampire.

Banksy’s Japanese chapter

Banksy is British, but Japan gave his story one of its strangest episodes: a stencilled rat on a Tokyo flood door, exhibitions he never approved and a BAPE tribute statue. Read Banksy and Japan.

Movement families at a glance

Ten families cover almost every name in our directory. The column on the right asks the question this hub keeps returning to: workshop or lone voice?

The flagship features

These are the deep features in the Artists Bible, each with a timeline, key works, collaborations and a full reading list. Artists we currently hold are listed first.

Mr., Chiho Aoshima and Katsuya Terada features are in preparation. For the wider scene, see our guide to Japanese contemporary art, whatever happened to Cool Japan and Japanese maximalism.

A to Z of key names

A shortlist from our 236-name working directory, with life dates where the record is firm. The complete list by period lives in Japanese artists by era, and the newest names in upcoming artists. Japanese and international names in one alphabet sit in Artists A to Z.

A to K

  • Genpei Akasegawa: Hi-Red Center, 1963
  • Chiho Aoshima (b.1974): Kaikai Kiki
  • Hamada Shōji (1894 to 1978): mingei potter
  • Hasegawa Tōhaku: Momoyama ink and gold
  • Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558 to 1637): Rinpa founder
  • Katsushika Hokusai: ukiyo-e
  • Itō Jakuchū: Kyoto individualist
  • Kanō Masanobu (1434 to 1530): Kanō founder
  • Kawase Hasui (1883 to 1957): shin-hanga
  • Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847 to 1915): Meiji prints
  • Yayoi Kusama (b.1929): dots and nets

L to R

  • Lee Ufan: Mono-ha
  • Daidō Moriyama: Provoke
  • Hishikawa Moronobu: early ukiyo-e
  • Mr. (b.1969): Kaikai Kiki
  • Takashi Murakami (b.1962): Superflat
  • Hiroshi Nagai (b.1947): city pop
  • Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959): Neo-Pop
  • NIGO (b.1970): BAPE and Human Made
  • Ogata Kōrin (1658 to 1716): Rinpa
  • Rockin’Jelly Bean: pin-up screen prints

S to Z

  • Nobuo Sekine: Mono-ha
  • Sesshū Tōyō: Zen ink
  • Tōshūsai Sharaku (active 1794 to 1795): actor prints
  • Chiharu Shiota: thread installations, Japan at the 2015 Venice Biennale
  • Kazuo Shiraga: Gutai foot painting
  • Hajime Sorayama (b.1947): superrealism
  • Keiichi Tanaami (1936 to 2024): psychedelic pop
  • Katsuya Terada (b.1963): illustration
  • Unkei: Kei school sculptor
  • Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1753 to 1806): bijin-ga
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858): landscape prints
  • Yamamoto Kanae (1882 to 1946): creative prints
  • Tadanori Yokoo (b.1936): posters
  • Jirō Yoshihara: Gutai founder
  • Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 to 1892): last ukiyo-e master

A correction to the common story

A correction to the common story: ukiyo-e is often told as a gallery of solo geniuses, Hokusai here and Hiroshige there. In practice every print came out of a four-way partnership of designer, carver, printer and publisher, and the publisher usually decided what got made. When creative printmakers broke with that system from 1904, refusing to share the work, it was treated as a revolution. That is exactly why it mattered.

Where the record differs

  • How many dogū? Estimates for surviving clay figures run from about 15,000, the national history museum’s figure, to about 18,000 in press reports.
  • When does Mono-ha start? Most accounts place the group in the mid-1960s, but its defining work, Sekine’s Phase: Mother Earth, dates from October 1968.
  • The Great Wave’s date. Museums catalogue it as 1830 to 1833 rather than a single year, because the series was issued over several years.

What we checked and left out

Every name in the directory was matched to at least one encyclopaedic identity record, and nine names that we could not confirm with confidence are held back from public pages until they are. Several popular stories did not make it in. We found no firm record for the birth years of Rockin’Jelly Bean or Banksy, so neither appears. We also left out market rankings of artists, which change too quickly to be useful in a reference page.

Further reading

References