Japan Wall Art

Japan Wall Art: One Register at a Time

The common mistake is treating Japan as a single look. A hushed ink-wash mountain, a neon alley at midnight and a red gate under blossom are three different countries as far as a wall is concerned, and hanging them together produces a travel agent's window rather than a room. Choose the register first — quiet and tonal, or saturated and urban — then choose within it.

Quiet is the easier of the two to live with. Ink-wash and minimal photographic work leave large areas of empty paper or fog, and that emptiness is the subject, not a shortage of content. It needs room to do its job, which means a generous margin of bare wall and nothing else hung within a hand's width. Crowd it and the calm evaporates.

Urban night work asks the opposite. It is dark, high in contrast, and carries most of its interest in small bright signs and reflections, so it needs either a wall that catches daylight or a lamp nearby. In a dim room a near-black city image becomes a dark rectangle, and all the detail you paid for stops existing after sunset.

Format is worth settling before you fall for an image. The traditional shape is the vertical scroll: tall, narrow, read from top to bottom. That suits the strip of wall beside a doorway, the space between two windows, or a stairwell far better than the area above a sofa, which is nearly always a wide-format problem. Mountains and coastlines solve the wide wall; a single tree, a gate, a lantern or a street solves the narrow one.

If you do hang more than one, hold the palette to two colours and let the compositions carry the variety instead. Two tonal ink pieces with different weights of empty space look considered. An ink mountain next to a neon crossing looks like two people went shopping separately.