MINNEAPOLIS -- Japan's cultural exchanges with the West that began in the decades after U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry's fleet forced the feudal country to open up to foreign trade have been well documented. Perry's "black ships" famously stormed into Edo Bay in 1853; subsequently, information and ideas about art, design, fashion, literature and technology began flowing between the West and isolationist Japan which, until the Americans' menacing arrival, had remained closed to much of the world for 265 years.
Looking more closely at that era in Japan, art historians have noted that as the Edo period (1603-1868) waned, so did the Chinese-derived tradition of so-called literati or scholar-poet painters, who were known as nanga or bunjinga. Inspired by classical Chinese literature and aesthetics, with a big nod to nature, their creations combined the elegance and eloquence of sensitive poetry, skillful calligraphy, and a proficient handling of the artist's brush -- individually expressive up to a point but always mindful of certain genre-delimiting conventions.
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