Poems and Pictures of the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (1605–12): Art, History and Details

Poems and Pictures of the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang (1605–12) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Unkoku Tōgan (Japanese, 1547–1618); Inkei Gentetsu (Japanese, 1562–1612).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Unkoku Tōgan brushed these scenes using the splashed-ink technique associated in Japan with the Chinese monk Yujian Ruofen (active late 1200s). Xiao-Xiang refers to the region in present-day Hunan province, where the Xiang River and its tributaries converge. Each of the eight views evokes a time of day or season. The earliest surviving series of Xiao-Xiang paintings is by Wang Hong (active mid-1100s), but textual evidence tells us the theme appears earlier. It was later adopted in Japan and Korea, as seen here. The poems were inscribed by Inkei Gentetsu, the third abbot of the Rinzai Zen temple Tōshunji, Japan

Object facts

• Title: Poems and Pictures of the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang
• Date: 1605–12
• Creator attribution: Unkoku Tōgan (Japanese, 1547–1618); Inkei Gentetsu (Japanese, 1562–1612)
• Culture: Japan, Momoyama period (1573–1615)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Handscroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: 40.3 x 657.8 cm (15 7/8 x 259 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2020.258

A detail from the museum

The “Tō” of Tōgan comes from the name of painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506).

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fukuda, Yoshiko 福田善子 and Hideo Yamamoto 山本英男. Unkoku Tōgan: botsugo yonhyakunen [雲谷等顔: 没後四〇〇年 = Unkoku Togan: 400th memorial retrospective]. Yamaguchi-shi: Unkoku Tōgan Ten Jikkō Iinkai, 2018.
• Fukuda Yoshiko, “Unkoku Tōgan hitsu Inkei Gentetsu san Shōshō hakkei shiga kan (Handscroll of Poems and Paintings of the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang brushed by Unkoku Tōgan and Inscribed by Gentetsu),” Kokka, no. 1492, vol. 125, no. 7, Reiwa 2, 2-gatsu (February 2020), pp. 22–28.
• Griswold, William, Xiaofei Tian, Richard Von Glahn, Feng Zhao, S. J. Vainker, Masaaki Itakura, Jiang Wu, et al. China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta. Edited by Clarissa Von Spee. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.