Live flowers have always been one of the favourite themes of Japanese artists, masters of famous mosaic works and frescoes, woodcarvers and jasper carvers.
And it can be seen that since ancient times in the minds of the Japanese people to live flowers associated with the thoughts of the beautiful and sublime, with the aspirations for a better, perfect life, the triumph of life force and justice.
Flowers are the favourite plot of Japanese painting. It is interesting to note that this direction had its specific designation - "flowers and birds". It is enough to see these two hieroglyphic signs, as before your eyes now will appear numerous canvases with "flowers and birds". Europeans often say that this is a decorative painting. This is not quite accurate.
Such painting has become decorative, but it was not so when it appeared and rose. The formula "flowers and birds" gives the key to this art: "birds" are taken with bright plumage, with fantastic creatures, with whimsical tails; "flowers" - along with branches, that is, crosses and lines. So before you - the world, its own, special world: the world of colours, lines and shapes. Add to this the most important thing: what the Japanese see in colour, line and shape. Some are conscious.
Through philosophy, others unconsciously, so to speak intuitively, through centuries-old aesthetics. The Japanese people's great attention to flowers and their role in the spiritual and cultural life of people is evidenced by the earliest literary, particularly poetic, works of Japanese masters of the art.
In the folklore songs of the oldest Chinese poetic monument "Shijing" - "Songbooks". Also known in Japan, flowers are one of the favourite themes. A significant place is occupied by the motifs of fresh flowers in another work - "Chui Stanzas". It is not surprising that Japan and China are very popular in Japan because, despite the numerous contradictions, they are very much connected by strong threads of mutual culture. We can say that the culture of Ancient China was the ancestor of the culture of Ancient Japan.
One of the oldest songs, "Worship of the soul" from the cycle "Nine melodies" of the founder of Chinese poetry, Qiu Yuan (340-278 B.C.), whose works reached us in hieroglyphic writings: in spring the orchids blossom, in autumn the chrysanthemums blossom, and in the autumn our rituals stretch in succession. It is remarkable that the mention of chrysanthemums, maybe not yet cultivated, but wild is contained in the literary records of the grey antiquity. However, judging by the Chrysanthemum Tables The composition of which dates back to the tenth century, already then there were up to seventy species of chrysanthemums.
It is the chrysanthemums, which, according to the Japanese market, "can fight against the breath of autumn and the greyish of winter". The first part of the book is dedicated to the inspired lines of numerous poems, and many legends and fairytales about these flowers are told. Peru, the outstanding Chinese novelist Pu Sung-Lin (Liao Zhai) is the owner of a wonderful novel about a flower lover named Mao Ziqai, whose family passed on the secret of growing chrysanthemum flowers from father to child. Mao Tzi-Tsai became a passionate florist. He hears that somewhere there is a new kind of chrysanthemum - he and a thousand miles is not afraid, the same immediately on the road, just to get a rare flower. One day Mao Tzi-Tsai went to Nanlin to get chrysanthemum and met a young man named Tao, who had the art of growing chrysanthemums.
Thrown away by others, sickly flowers blossomed quickly and brought new varieties as soon as they fell into Tao's magical hands. Soon Mao Tzi-Tsai married Tao's older sister, Juang-in, and both families were related. Once Tao drank too much, the drunk man fell to the ground and immediately turned into a huge chrysanthemum bush. Only the next day he returned to his former appearance. But soon Tao, again heavily intoxicated, turned into a huge chrysanthemum bush, but now the human image has not returned to him. Juang-in was desperate, and her bitter tears were never over. Burying the roots of the bush in the ground, she began to take care of them diligently, watering them. And to her extreme amazement, in the autumn on the bush blossomed pink chrysanthemums, emitting an intoxicating aroma. Thus, a new kind of chrysanthemum called "drunken TAO" appeared.
Growing from generation to generate new varieties of chrysanthemums, Chinese flower growers gave them names one more poetic than the other. Here, both the "flying golden butterfly" and the "fertile snow - the harbinger of the harvest" and "sunny dawn", "jasper charm with a fluttering ribbon".
This is how the artistic drawing, the subtle form created by nature under the active influence of man, was combined with a lively emotional word, a poetic image. This is one of the manifestations of the ideals of the beautiful, figurative disclosure of the aesthetic beginning in the life of the people.