Tibet and Japan

I have long noticed a certain similarity between the art of Tibet and Japan. Although there are significant differences, you can immediately see the close relationship of the Tibetan and Chinese art pictured here. The important points of correspondence are: the use of textile patches juxtaposed with bare areas of flesh, which is unshadowed and white. Notice in the Tibetan painting how the pattern of the background becomes intermingled with the textile patterns worn by the figures. The composition is composed of discrete shapes. When looked at from a certain perspective, they become abstract. This property is emphasized even more in the Japanese print. I count about 6 or 7 different patterns in the central mass of textiles; it is hard to tell if some patterns are fading permutations or two different patterns in their own right. Look at the detail of the Tibetan painting and notice how many different patterns are juxtaposed within this small detail. If you count the body itself as a pattern, there are at least 10 separate motifs in this small section.

Now look at a similar detail from the Japanese print. If you count the writing, the grass, head ornaments, etc. as equal motifs (which the composition encourages you to do)

Now these motifs are in fact occurring on a single picture plane. That is the reality. But pictorial language often assumes that some planes are behind others. Often this is an obvious trope as in a blue sky and green grass being behind central figures. In the Tibetan painting the back plane is the crimson swirls, but when you look at a detail, you no longer feel that this illusion is important , and you are encouraged to see every window of pattern on the same plane. In both paintings it often becomes unclear which plane is in front of which, and a raw pattern of abstraction emerges in which pattern is no longer connected to function.

One other aspect needs to be discussed here and that is symmetry. The Japanese print is studiously asymetrical, whereas the Tibetan painting is dead-on symmetrical, which to our Western eyes feels a bit "boring." It doesn't feel "real" and it would certainly break all the conventional rules of Western composition before, say, 1950.
In addition, I have framed the Tibetan painting in a way that makes it seem more modern. The original painting has a very large halo behind the central group of figures, which, come to think of it, is an awful lot like that umbrella in the Japanese print.