Flowers and Birds

Flowers and Birds (Kachō-zu) is a hanging-scroll painting by Araki Jippō in gouache on paper, dating to the last years of the painter's life (before his death in 1944) and now held by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, one of the principal collecting institutions for the painting of colonial-period Taiwan. The work bears directly on Jippō's role as one of the most active Japanese painters in the colonial-period Taiwan art world: from 1927 onward he traveled repeatedly to Taiwan as a juror at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiten) organized by the Government-General, and he brought representative bird-and-flower compositions with him on each visit as 'model works' (mohan-saku) for the local tōyōga (Eastern-style) painters competing in the salon. Compositions of this kind were widely emulated by the Taiwan tōyōga school of the late 1920s and 1930s, and the survival of works such as this one in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts collection reflects the institutional channel by which the Tokyo nihonga tradition entered the colonial Taiwan art world. The painting itself combines the close observation of feather and petal structure that Jippō had inherited from his training under Araki Kanpō with the controlled atmospheric handling of background space that distinguished his mature work, and represents the formal, decoratively disciplined ideal of the Tokyo bird-and-flower establishment that Jippō exported into colonial Taiwan through his repeated jury service at the Taiten.