Nihonga

Nihonga, literally Japanese-style painting, emerged in the 1880s as a self-consciously modern movement to preserve and renew traditional Japanese painting materials and techniques, mineral pigments, sumi ink, gold leaf and silk or paper supports, in deliberate contrast to the newly imported Western oil painting, yoga, that Meiji-era modernization was rapidly absorbing. The American scholar Ernest Fenollosa and his Japanese collaborator Okakura Tenshin were central to the movement's formation, arguing through the newly founded Tokyo School of Fine Arts that Japan's own pictorial tradition, drawing on Kano and Rinpa school precedent, could be modernized in subject and composition without abandoning its native materials and brushwork. Artists including Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso developed a hazy, atmospheric technique called moro-tai that dispensed with the traditional outline, and Nihonga remains a living, officially recognized category in Japanese art institutions and exhibitions today, existing alongside rather than superseded by Western-style painting.