Rendering Life and Lively Renderings: Sō Shiseki and the Evolving Significance of Bird-and-Flower Painting in Early Modern Japan

In eighteenth-century Japan, bird-and-flower painting became an active site of knowledge formation as artists studied art historical conventions while, at times, training their sights on the world around them. These two approaches, however, could also come into conflict. This paper will explore artworks made in response to both market expectations and living beings—two phenomena beyond the control of any one human individual. How and why did Japanese painters negotiate the weight of tradition with evolving knowledge about the natural world?

This paper focuses on the visual experiments of Japanese artist Sō Shiseki (1715–1786), who both claimed the Chinese painter Shen Nanpin (ca. 1682–1760) as his patriarch while emphasizing his newly “invented” method of “rendering life.” In contrast to Shiseki’s interest in observation-based painting, works attributed to Nanpin indexed extant painting. So outsized was Japanese collector-driven demand for Nanpin painting that a brand developed for his name independent of the artist as agent. Under such a schema, a successful “Nanpin” painting was one that could best perform its attribution, which resulted in the production of works combining a recognizable suite of motifs—pairings that at times defied a more ecologically attuned logic. Shiseki studied paintings attributed to Nanpin while working from other imagery and natural specimen. The result of his wide-ranging engagements exposed contortions between art historical tradition and real-world referents, revealing a shift in the meaning and potentials of painting.