Art terms on "J"
Japonisme
Japonisme (French Japonisme) is a term coined in the late nineteenth century for the Western fascination with Japanese art and design, which erupted after Japan was opened to trade in the 1850s. Colour woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) by masters such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, together with Japanese ceramics, fans, kimonos and folding screens, were imported into Europe in quantity and eagerly collected. Artists borrowed from them bold cropping, a high horizon line, flat fields of saturated colour, decorative outlines, asymmetry and a rejection of academic perspective. The influence of Japonisme is evident in the work of Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, James McNeill Whistler and the Nabis. The enthusiasm extended to the applied arts, shaping Art Nouveau, the poster and graphic design. Japonisme became one of the key catalysts in the passage from Realism to Modernism, unsettling European assumptions about space, composition and the role of the decorative in art.
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Jikken Kobo (experimental workshop)
Jikken Kobo, meaning experimental workshop, was an interdisciplinary group of artists, musicians, choreographers and poets founded in Tokyo in 1951 that drew inspiration from European and American avant-garde artists. The association included some fourteen members, among them the composer Toru Takemitsu, the artists Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Shozo Kitadai, the pianist Takahiro Sonoda and others. The group sought to overcome the boundaries between different art forms and to create synthetic, integrated works combining visual art, music, poetry, dance, theatre and new technical means, notably slide projection and tape recording. Its members staged concert-presentations in which music, visual imagery and stage action merged into a single whole, and also developed early forms of audiovisual installation. Jikken Kobo operated in the context of the postwar Japanese avant-garde, when the country was actively absorbing and reinterpreting international modernist currents. The group lasted until roughly the end of the 1950s and had a significant influence on the later development of Japanese experimental, electronic and intermedia art.
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