Foreshadowing: Hiroyuki MORI, Masayoshi NOJO, CHANG Ching-Wen, YEH Jen-Kun, HSU Fan-Hsuan, Ryo SHINAGAWA, CHEN Yi Chia

Materials and Techniques of Asian Gouache

There are no other restrictions on the materials used in Asian gouache except that animal glue must be used as the binder medium. The support can be stone, soil wall, wood plank, hemp, silk, or paper; the pigments can be minerals, soils, metals or shells; and the dyes can derive from plants, insects or ink. The ways humans perceive and the social function of art have evolved over time. The presence or absence of materials in an area and the routes of transmission of resources, culture and technology are influenced by geographical conditions. Hence the selection and use of painting materials vary with the time and place, each with its own preferences and limitations. In the Kofun period, most of the murals in the burial chambers were stone walls. During the Nara period, the murals of Buddhist temples were mostly clay walls, while those in the Heian period were mostly wooden ones. The Buddhist and landscape paintings of the Nara period were mostly on hemp, and then largely on silk in the Heian period, whereas the extravagant and gorgeous partition or interior wall paintings of the Momoyama period were mostly painted on paper. Inheriting more than just traditional Japanese painting techniques, Nihonga also borrowed techniques from Western painting, with the aim of developing Nihonga into a genre that can compete with Yoga (Western painting). In order to achieve this goal, Nihonga adopted the scale of oil paintings to determine the size of the scene and emphasized in teaching the use of “live sketching” to rid of the disadvantages of the “copybook method”. At the same time, Nihonga considered how to be modern but different from Western. To enrich the choices of colors, aside from finding or synthesizing various natural or artificial minerals, the minerals are subdivided by particle size that give different color gradations. Influenced by Nihonga, the choice of support for Asian gouache is primarily Japanese paper capable of supporting the heavy layers of pigments. After mounting the paper on a wooden board, live sketching is done first before it is finalized for painting. In terms of the choice of pigments and techniques, the main focus is on accentuating the mineral colors and freehand brushstrokes that can bring out the pigment texture. Semi-automatic techniques commonly used in Western modern painting such as dripping, rubbing, and grinding are also incorporated.

How to Appreciate Asian Gouache

The appreciation of Asian gouache remains the same as that of modern paintings—an aesthetic eye for the form, color, composition, brushstroke and so on. Of course, the more knowledgeable one is about its history, materials and techniques, the more one can appreciate its meaning and purpose. Although Nihonga is period-oriented, there is no shortage of works that engage in dialogues with history, invoking both the classic form of ancient Japanese art with a strong sense of period style and inheriting painting motifs with a long historical tradition. In the former case, there is Fukinuki yatai (blown-off roof) commonly seen in Genji Monogatari Emaki (The Tale of Genji Scroll), the “Golden Clouds” of the Kano School, and the flat and decorative patterns of the Rinpa school; while in the latter case, there are motifs like the four seasons of landscape, snow, moon and flowers, autumn grass, flowers and birds, and beauties. In contrast, Asian gouache seldom invokes classic forms with a strong sense of history. Even when traditional painting motifs are chosen, they are based on what are seen in the live sketching. In terms of the materials used, oil painting involves grinding minerals to the finest participles, mixing the colors on a palette and then applying them on the canvas. Asian gouache, on the other hand, uses varying coarseness and fineness of the mineral particles to distinguish the chroma. After applying them on the support in layers, it achieves the color mixing effect through the heterogenous fineness of the particles and the varying densities. Similar to oil paintings, classical technique of Asian gouache also uses multiple thin layers of paint in expressing uncertain space. The difference: this technique captures light in oils, but air in Asian gouache. The modern technique of Asian gouache also uses impasto to express the texture of pigments as in oils. While oil impasto produces a viscous and glossy cream-like texture, the impasto of Asian gouache from applying coarse-grained minerals produces a dry sandpaper-like glittery texture. Of particular note is the use of metal foils. Their use in modern Asian gouache rarely refers to traditional religious connotations, but is rather seen as a material that changes the thickness or demarcates the spaces of a painting. The torn edges of metal foil created by tearing are also viewed as a special kind of brushstroke or texture, and are used in the shaping or composition.

Above articles: The History of Asian Gouache, Materials and Techniques of Asian Gouache, How to Appreciate Asian Gouache, wrote by SHEN, Yu-Chang, PhD in Doctoral Program in Art Creation and Theory, The College of Visual Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts, Tainan, TAIWAN