Today, let's talk about a pair of screen paintings from China. Take a look at the photo below. These are very large and luxurious screens, don't you think?

Yuan Jiang, Landscape with Pavilion
China, Qing Dynasty (1720)
246 cm (h.) x 490 cm (w.)
(Kyoto National Museum)




Wang Yun, Landscape with Pavilion
China, Qing Dynasty (1720)
Pair of eight-fold screens, ink and color on gold paper,
246 cm (h.) x 490 cm (w.)
(Kyoto National Museum)

These screen paintings are made on gold paper with black ink and brilliant colors! They show scenes of soaring mountains and a rushing waterfall pouring into a large lake. In a gorge in the mountains stands a magnificent villa within which we see tiny figures.

These paintings were made in 1720, in the Kangxi Period of the Qing Dynasty. They were painted by not one, but two artists! The artists names were Yuan Jiang and Wang Yun and they lived in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province in China. Because each of these two screens can folded into eight panels, they are called "a pair of eight-fold screens." This is a typical format for screen paintings. These are very large screens: the paintings themselves are 246 cm (8 ft. 4 in.) tall and 490 cm (16 ft 1 in.) wide, but the screens are set on carved animal feet, so they actually stand over three meters high! The screens onto which these paintings are fixed were made a little later in time than the paintings, but they seem to be in the same style as the original frames.

The word for screen in Japanese is byobu. These same characters are read as bingfeng in Chinese. The word actually means "wind screen," but by no means were byobu used only to protect people inside from the wind; screens decorated with paintings and calligraphy were enjoyed as works of art! When screens weren't in use, they could be folded up and put away, making them a convenient and portable, interior furnishing.

In Japan, byobu screens are still used today for various purposes. Have you ever seen a gold screen placed behind the guests of honor at some celebratory event? These are the same kind of screens that were originally imported into Japan from China many years ago!

The word bingfeng has been used in China for over 2100 years! The word appears in written documents from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), but there is evidence that screens were in use even earlier than that! In the beginning, screens were made of only one standing panel, but over time, folding screens with two, four, six, eight or more panels evolved! A book called New Anecdotes of Gossip (Shishuo Xinyu) from the 5th Century (the Song Period of China's Northern and Southern Dynasties) tells of a man who is full of flattery for others, does everything for his own benefit and is "as crooked as a folding screen." This story proves that folding screens were already common in China by the 5th Century. Later, folding screens were given a special name (weibing, "enclosing screen") to distinguish them from single-panel standing screens.

In the 9th Century, an art historian named Zhang Yanyuan wrote of six-fold and twelve-fold screen paintings from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in his book Record of Famous Paintings in Successive Dynasties (Lidai Minghua Ji). The Feathers and Standing Girl Screens in the Shosoin Treasury in Nara, which were based on Tang styles but made in Japan, and the recently excavated wall murals from a Tang Dynasty tomb in China prove that in the Tang Dynasty, each panel of a folding screen had a border around the edge. The panels were connected with cords, so each panel had to have a border! Also, unlike the continuous scenery in the screens above, each Tang Dynasty screen panel had a independent scene.

When the format of folding screens came from China into Japan, however, the Japanese devised a kind of hinge made of strong paper, which made borders on each panel unnecessary. The removal of these borders allowed folding screens, which had formerly been divided into separate frames, to become one large, uninterrupted surface, giving the artist new and exceptional potential for expression on a grand scale!

Text by Minoru Nishigami, Department of Archives
Illustrations by Satoshi Ichida, Department of Public Relations
English Translation by Melissa M. Rinne, Department of Archives