Giving a lot of point for this 100 points to be pecific During the Heian period, many artists continued to be influenced by Chinese art. Gradually, however, sculptors and painters created their own Japanese styles.
Early Heian sculptors commonly made an entire work from a single piece of wood. Later in this period, sculptors made statues by carving separate pieces from carefully selected wood and then joining them. With the help of assistants, sculptors could make the separate parts in large quantities, enabling them to create a group of similar statues quickly and precisely. Jocho, an artist who worked for Fujiwara Michinaga, probably developed this technique.
Jocho made perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Heian sculpture, the Amida Buddha. This beautifully carved Buddha, “The Lord of Boundless Light,” expresses a sense of deep peace and strength.
In painting, Heian artists consciously developed a Japanese style, which they called yamato-e, or “Japanese painting.” Painters drew their scenes with thin lines and then filled them in with bright colors. Lines were made quickly to suggest movement, but they were drawn more deliberately in restful scenes.
At first, artists used the new style to paint Buddhist subjects, but over time they focused on nonreligious scenes. There were four main types of yamato-e: landscapes showing the four seasons, places of natural beauty, people doing seasonal tasks, and scenes from literature (called “story paintings”).
The new style of painting was used to decorate walls, screens, and the sliding doors of houses and temples. Some of the most famous examples of yamato-e, however, are scroll paintings. A scroll painting shows a series of scenes from right to left so that viewers see events chronologically as they unroll the scroll. Scroll painting had been invented in China, but Heian painters added their own distinctive touches. For example, they often showed scenes inside buildings from above, as if the viewer were peering down though an invisible roof.
The sculptor Jocho developed the
technique called yosegi-zukuri, in which
blocks of wood were hollowed out,
carved, and then assembled. This Amida
Buddha is a replica of Jocho’s work.
2. How did the process of carving statues change during this period?
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3. How did painting change during this period?
