Examining Nihonga's Historical Segregation and Contemporary Relevance

Chelsea Foxwell's 2015 article published on ARTMargins Online critically examines nihonga, a Japanese painting tradition established in the 1880s to differentiate indigenous styles from Western oil painting. The term was created during an era of Orientalism, driven by anxieties about preserving a distinctively Japanese artistic identity. Foxwell notes that nihonga has maintained a separate category from broader contemporary art, representing what she describes as the earliest example of "tradition-based contemporary art" globally. In practice, nihonga became defined by specific material and stylistic conventions; when these criteria were no longer met, the distinction from other artistic production blurred. This has created a paradoxical situation where nihonga must continually reaffirm what scholar Kitazawa Noriaki termed its "sad history" of segregation to avoid disappearing. The article questions the utility and advantages of maintaining nihonga and similar tradition-based categories as discrete entities within contemporary art. Foxwell analyzes artworks and texts that challenge the boundaries between nihonga and modern-contemporary production. The piece was published on February 5, 2015, and is available through MIT Press with subscription access.