Amaranthus and Mynah Bird

Kaigan Jōkō spent his early years as a priest at Shōfukuji 聖福寺, an Ōbaku Zen temple in his native Nagasaki, where he also studied painting under Kumashiro Yūhi 熊代熊斐 (1712–1773), the most prominent Japanese student of the Chinese émigré painter Shen Quan (Shen Nanpin; 1682–1760), who had spent several years in Nagasaki in the early 1730s. Yūhi nurtured numerous students in Nagasaki, giving rise to a network of painters that would come to be known as the Nanpin school or Nagasaki school. Yūhi’s two top disciples, Kaigan Jōkō (better known by his sobriquet Kakutei) and Sō Shiseki 宋紫石 (1715–1786) are credited with transmitting the school’s colorful, naturalistic style of bird-and-flower painting to the cities of Kyoto and Edo, respectively. In this picture, Kakutei depicts a mynah bird flying above a rock and large pink-colored amaranthus, the characters of whose Chinese-origin Japanese name, ganraikō, literally means “crimson of the goose’s arrival,” referring to the plant’s autumnal transformation. Moving away from the Shen Nanpin derived styles promoted by his teacher, here Kakutei uses the so-called boneless method to depict the amaranthus’s leaves without contour lines. Kakutei’s influence on better known painters in eighteenth-century Kyoto such as Itō Jakuchū and Ike Taiga is often noted.