Obaku Zen portrait painting: A revisionist analysis.

Abstract

This dissertation concerns a body of early modern portrait paintings of eminent Chan and Zen Buddhist monks associated with a Chinese emigre monastic community in Japan known as Obaku. Over two hundred and fifty portraits survive from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries. These are executed in a colorful style and bold en face format featuring a heavily applied modeling method. As they differ dramatically in style from traditional medieval East Asian portraits of eminent Buddhist monks, and, indeed, from all prior genres of Japanese portrait painting, modern scholars are led to focus on identifying their Western (Indic and/or European) stylistic sources and to overlook their ritual use and religious meaning. I begin the dissertation with the premise that the portraits by the prolific Kita Genki (active ca. 1664-1709) have enticed modern scholars to become preoccupied with the notion of Western influence. I then explore claims of such influence on painting in seventeenth-century China and Japan, giving special attention to the late Ming portraitist Zeng Jing (1564-1647) whose followers are believed to have established the format and style of early Obaku portrait paintings. This leads to a consideration of the rhetoric of Western influence in studies of Chinese painting. Preconceptions concerning the nature of mainstream Chinese and European painting have led scholars to align linear techniques with China and modeling techniques with Europe. I argue, however, that the rhetoric of Western influence is historically suspect and ideologically laden; in the Obaku case it is frequently used to marginalize and disparage Obaku portraiture. Building on the work of Nishigori Ryosuke I then reexamine a wide selection of extant early portraits in order to identify internal stylistic developments freed of the legacy of the later portraits in the Genki style. In concluding, I link the Obaku material to ancestor portraiture, and return it squarely to the fold of medieval Chan and Zen Buddhist portraiture known as chinzo. The dissertation includes five appendices: two outline the early history of the Obaku lineage in Japan and the career of its founder Yinyuan Longgi (1592-1673); three summarize Nishigori's research on the early major portraitists Yang Daozhen, Kita Doku (Chobei), and Kita Genki.