Insect Procession

Insect Procession is a handscroll by Mori Kansai in ink and color on paper held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2015.79.173). The scroll deploys the conventions of the chōjū-giga (bird-and-animal caricature) tradition, in which insects, birds, animals, or small creatures are arranged in a procession or narrative grouping that often parodies human social ceremony. Kansai's procession arranges butterflies, beetles, mantises, crickets, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and other insects across a long horizontal field, each rendered with the close natural observation that the Maruyama-Shijō and Mori-Kishi schools had refined through generations of sketching-from-life. The handscroll format invites slow lateral reading, so that the viewer encounters each insect in turn and grasps the procession as a kind of comic and naturalist parade. Such works played to the Edo and Meiji taste for the haikai aesthetic — the elevation of small, ordinary creatures to the level of pictorial and poetic dignity — and demonstrate the breadth of Kansai's subject range beyond the major painting formats of hanging scroll and screen.