Art and craft traditions: Japan and China

Ukiyo-e means 'pictures of the floating world'. These Japanese woodblock prints were popular in the Edo period (1603 to 1868).
They showed actors, beautiful landscapes, everyday life and travel. Each colour was printed from a separate carved wooden block.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849) designed Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858) designed One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Van Gogh painted copies of two of his prints.
The European craze for Japanese art in the late 1800s is called Japonisme.

Chinese painters and calligraphers used the four treasures of the study: the brush, ink, paper and inkstone.
Landscape painting in ink is called shan shui, meaning 'mountain water'. Artists use bold and delicate brushstrokes and leave empty space to suggest mist and distance.
Porcelain is a fine, hard, white ceramic first developed in China. Blue-and-white porcelain, painted with cobalt blue under the glaze, became famous in the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644) and was traded around the world. In English, porcelain is still often called 'china'.

Kintsugi is a Japanese method of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold.
Instead of hiding the cracks, it highlights them, so the repair becomes part of the object's beauty and history.
You could use this idea in your own work, for example by mending torn paper with gold paint or thread.