Bamboo

Hine Taizan is one of the most important 19th-century artists of the Nanga school, the Japanese counterpart to the Southern school amateur-scholar painting tradition in China. (The term "Nanga" is Japanese for "Southern School".) Taizan excelled in both calligraphy and painting, particularly landscapes and images of bamboo.

Depictions of bamboo in monochrome ink— in which the painter does not use brilliant colors but limits his palette to a saturated black ink and subtle tones of diluted grays offset by the white of the paper or silk ground— were favored by many Japanese literatus artists and their Korean and Chinese counterparts from the 15th to early 20th centuries. In such monochromatic ink painting (works called in Japan suiboko, literally "water and ink"), sparse lines and silhouetted forms communicate the essence of the subject.

The practitioners of monochrome ink painting saw in this genre’s nuanced subtleties of black-and-white contrasts the essence of restrained beauty. In such works, painters projected an inner response to their subject, rejecting what they considered the fleeting coloration and mutable forms of the objective world. For them, austere coloration, linear forms, and flatness echoed the formal values of calligraphy, which they deemed the most esteemed of all visual art forms.