Wang Zhaojun (Ō Shōkun)

Painted in 1902 and exhibited at the seventh Nihon Bijutsuin exhibition that year, Wang Zhaojun (Japanese reading: Ō Shōkun) is a pair of six-panel folding screens that depict the famous historical episode of the Han dynasty palace lady Wang Zhaojun being sent in marriage to the Xiongnu chieftain in 33 BCE — a subject that became one of the foundational tragic narratives of Chinese poetry and painting, treated by Tang and Song masters through to the late-Qing and early-Republican periods. Hishida's screens, executed in color on paper in the large-scale rokkyokubyōbu format, depict Wang Zhaojun seated centrally amid her attendants and the assembled Xiongnu warriors and tribesmen who have come to receive her, with the bleak northern landscape spreading behind them in atmospheric washes of muted color. The composition extends laterally across the full twelve panels of the two screens, with each figure individually characterized in subtle nihonga draftsmanship. The work is one of Hishida's most ambitious large-scale compositions of the early-1900s mōrō-tai period and represents the Nihon Bijutsuin program of drawing on shared East Asian iconographic and literary traditions (rather than exclusively Japanese sources) to construct a modern pan-Asian painting vocabulary, the same cultural project that drove Okakura Tenshin's 1903 The Ideals of the East. The screens are now held by Zenpōji Temple in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture.