Introduction
A work of art must have cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value. Firstly, a work of art is a product of purposeful human activity and culture and not an object of nature. Secondly, it represents the product of specific work in the field of art and is intended for a specific perception. Thirdly, artistic work is called a work of art with a certain level of completeness and expressiveness, correspondence of full-fledged content and form, integrity, and the ability to influence the viewer, listener, and reader.
Japanese Art
The creation of a work of art is the final act of the creative process in art. Its appearance always means the emergence of a new aesthetic reality, a unique artistic world that lives according to its own laws. Despite all the differences between works of art from each other, they are all equally united by a single basis — they are the result of creativity according to the laws of beauty and the laws of aesthetic development of reality. Japanese painting is the most exquisite art form in the land of the Rising Sun. It developed in different directions and styles, but just like the fine arts of China and Korea, it was inseparable from calligraphy. Japanese artists both painted and painted with a brush. Thus, there were exciting techniques that were not peculiar to Western art.
The Japanese painting style is correspondingly characterized by an unusual composition structure and exquisite color solutions. Japanese art has been distinguished by high artistry since ancient times (Fiero 229). The proof is the excellent examples that have come down to modern times, not only of fine arts but also of those that the Western tradition calls decorative and applied. This shows that there has never been a difference between art and craft in Japan.
A work of art, therefore, is an active, personal reflection in which not only the reproduction of the reality of life takes place but also its creative transformation. In addition, the artist never reproduces reality for the sake of reproduction itself: the very choice of the subject of reflection, the very impulse to reproduce reality creatively, is born from the writer’s personal, biased, not indifferent view of the world. Thus, a work of art is an indissoluble unity of objective and subjective, reproduction of actual reality and the author’s understanding of it, life as such, included in the work of art and cognizable in it, and the author’s attitude to life (Fiero 318). In Japan, artistic culture is part of a single socio-cultural space that includes spiritual and moral values, ideological attitudes, and norms of interpersonal communication. It manifests itself as such, being a kind of connecting link in the relationship between other phenomena of culture and society.
Conclusion
The Western European tradition understands art as the creative reproduction of reality in artistic images, a form of sensory cognition of the world in contrast to rational and intuitive, which are considered science and religion, respectively. The result of artistic thinking is the reproduction of the world in its aesthetic diversity in art. In other words, it appears that the aesthetic understanding of reality, as it was understood in the West, is no different from the traditional worldview of the Japanese. This explained their special attention to the pattern of wood, the shape of stone, color, sand, or clay, and the desire to preserve the pristine nature of the material. Recall that the criterion of creativity, in contrast to manufacturing, is the uniqueness of the result, and art, being a means of sensually imaginative comprehension of the world, operates with artistic images, reflecting reality and attitude in them.
Work Cited
Fiero, Gloria. Landmarks in Humanities. 4th ed., McGraw Hill, 2016.