Jōgan Style

Jōgan style, Japanese sculptural style of the Early Heian period (794–897). Works of Buddhist sculpture are the most numerous monuments of the period. The figures are columnar icons, erect, symmetrical, and perfectly balanced, carved from single blocks of wood and displaying a keen sense of material, with no attempt to smooth over cuts of the knife. The massive bodies are corpulent and heavy, with almost flabby chests, large round faces, large lips, wide noses, and wide eyes. These parts are simplified to an almost geometric formula. Size and simple contours give the sculpture a forbidding monumentality.

The drapery, known as hompa (“wave”), is one of the most distinguishing features of the Jōgan style. The folds are cut deeply in a simple measured rhythm, a technique suggestive of the string drapery of the colossal image of the Buddha at Bāmīān, Afghanistan, which was a focal figure for all pilgrims traveling the Central Asian pilgrimage routes to Bāmīān and India; the statue was destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban. Holy images done in this style were carried back by pilgrims to China and Japan and became prototypes for sacred images carved there. The Jōgan style of drapery is actually an intermediate stage in the development of this mannerism. Alternating series of small and large waves compose the folds of the drapery.

The sculpture of this period is not confined to Buddhism. Shinto deities also were produced but in a simpler, blocklike, and more massive manner.