Journal of Graphic Science of Japan

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Fan decoration with calligraphy or painting is a unique art to Japan. Painting on fans was brought from Japan to Western Europe and China. While Chinese and Western painters presented pictorial scenes cut in the form of a sectorial window, Japanese painters, by contrast, distorted pictorial scenes in order to adapt them to the fan format. According to traditional Japanese painting methods, buildings were drawn by oblique projection or axonometric projection. However, in the case of fan paintings, the method was similar to three-point perspective or inverse perspective drawing. Thus, pictorial scenes on Japanese fans are distinctive from other painting formats and exhibit original expressive characteristics. Because of the sectorial form of the picture plane, three expressive compositional features result: the radial feature, the curved feature and the progressive feature. For this study, I have converted the sectorial picture planes of six fans in the series, Fans with Scenes from The Tale of Genji, into rectangular picture planes. I then examined the representation from the viewpoint of these three characteristics. By examining the distorted pictorial scenes on these fans, I have found that fan pictures are not simply transference of Japanese traditional methods for representing space onto a sectorial picture plane. Painters of fans not only intentionally distorted established drawing techniques according to the three features discussed above, but also worked by an intuitive sense of distortion. Scenes depicted on the unique sectorial picture plane of the fan were not merely compressed and composed, but methodically adapted to the picture plane.

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