Deity in Chinese Dress

"Deity in Chinese Dress" from 1945 captures a sacred figure in the continental clothing — the long robes, layered collars, and headdress associated with Chinese court or religious dress — that Munakata sometimes used to signify the Buddhist figures who had reached Japan via China's cultural mediation. The Chinese-dress deity is simultaneously foreign and familiar in the Japanese religious context, its continental origins registered in the costume while its sacred identity is entirely legible within the Japanese Buddhist tradition. The 1945 date makes this a wartime work, the sacred figure carved amid the circumstances of Japan's final year of war.