Mulan

Mulan (Mokuran, 木蘭) is a 1918 pair of six-panel folding screens by Hashimoto Kansetsu depicting the legendary Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan, who according to the famous Northern Wei-period Ballad of Mulan disguised herself as a man and served twelve years in the army in place of her aged father. The story was one of the most widely circulated Chinese narratives in Japan and a natural subject for Kansetsu's Tang-revival manner. The screens are executed in ink and color on silk and reflect Kansetsu's repeated travels to China beginning in 1914, his close study of Tang figure painting in Chinese collections, and his ambition to bring the kanga (Chinese painting) tradition into nihonga at the largest decorative scale. The figural drawing is grounded in his Maruyama-Shijō training under Takeuchi Seihō, while the costume, accoutrement, and compositional rhythm draw on Tang and Song precedents. The work is held by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in [Sakura](/glossary/sakura), Chiba, and is one of his most ambitious early Taishō exhibition pieces.