Japanese artists before the 20th century were mostly men, and so the painter and calligrapher Tokuyama Gyokuran (aka Ike Gyokuran) was a wonderfully talented anomaly. Living during the last age of the Shogun in the 18th-century Edo period, Gyokuran really departed from traditional women’s roles — she didn’t even shave her eyebrows, like married women were supposed to do!
Here you see a massive folding screen painted in ink and light color, entitled _Old Plum and West Lake_. It is currently on display at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC as part of an exhibition called “Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680-1980.” In this folding screen, Gyokuran focuses on a detail of a gnarled plumb tree branch on the left side of the composition, which turns into an immense landscape painting of a well known lake in China, framed in a mountainous background. Gyokuran never actually travelled to China, but belonged to a trendy artistic movement called _Bunjinga_, which means “literati,” whose artists were fascinated by Chinese culture.
I like to imagine Gyokuran, self-satisfied with her life, teaching her husband poetry while he taught her painting, the both of them playing music together, and having the confidence to take on monumental art. She outlived her spouse but still died before she was 60.
