Between West And East

Higashiyama Kaii, as a Japanese painter, has devoted himself to the exploration of fusion in Western and Eastern art. He studies painting art from modern, comparative and developing foresight and combines oriental art verve with western art trait successfully based on the deep understanding of Western art and the rethinking of Japanese traditional paintings, and then forms a distinct and unique artistic style in landscape painting.This thesis starts from the arguments of Higashiyama Kaii's landscape painting. It mainly summarizes the enlightenment of his artistic ideas and methods on us from exploring the forming factors of his artistic conception and unique characteristics and elaborating the modernity in his landscape paintings. This thesis is mainly divided into four parts:The first part illustrates the development of the Japanese painting and gives a general view of Higashiyama Kaii's personal artistic experience before he enters the realm of landscape painting. The second part discusses the concrete embodiment of integration of eastern and western art in Higashiyama Kaii's painting—the oriental beauty that advocates nature, meditation and ink painting; the western distinction that stresses space, lighting realism, symmetry as well as painting rhythm. The third part analyses the modernity in Higashiyama Kaii's landscape paintings, which is embodied in artistic nationalization and modernization, varied artistic styles, technique innovation, picture composition, contrast method, sense of abstract associated with interlacing images, in terms of the significance of artistic fusion in its time and the innovation of artistic conception. The fourth part demonstrates and summarizes the inspiration that we can draw from Higashiyama Kaii's paintings: an artist need to make works rich in traditional heritage, and at the same time he needs to break down the old convention and makes innovation so as to embody the spiritual connection between human beings and nature.Higashiyama Kaii's landscape paintings merge the tradition and modernity and hybrid the West and East. He not only develops a school of his own in Japanese art but also profoundly affects the painters all over the world, especially in China. Those paintings bear the style and spirit of Japanese tradition and closely resemble Western landscape paintings as well as have commonality with Chinese traditional mountains-and-waters paintings, and yet obviously break down the framework of them to invent a new technique and open up a fresh realm by this way. His unique artistic conception and technique play an indispensible role in the revolution and innovation of the modern Chinese art.