One painter of Dutch glass landscapes called Maruyama Okyo

shrewdly focused on revered Japanese subjects,

like the medieval Hollyhock Festival,

infusing them with a new sense of depth.

Soon his reputation grew.

Okyo began to win more serious commissions.

On a pair of temple screens,

he painted bamboo with more delicately observed naturalism

than anything yet seen in Japanese art.

On one side, buffeted by the wind...

On the other, in the rain,

heavily laden and still.

But it was for his masterpiece

that Okyo combined everything he knew

from both eastern and western traditions

in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful

of all Japanese works.

It's so subtle, so minimal a work of art

that it almost feels like it isn't there,

and everything about it feels ephemeral and frail.

It's painted on paper, not canvas as in the west,

and great expanses of it are just white, blank areas

that seem almost untouched by the artist,

and yet all of that belies the fact

that this is one of the most sophisticated works

of cultural synthesis that I know.

It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake,

and these broken, jagged cracks in the ice

disappear into the mist.

The effect is three-dimensional space.

Now, that is European vanishing-point perspective,

and yet this, one of Okyo's masterworks,

just could not be more Japanese,

because it's a philosophical contemplation

of two concepts fundamental to Buddhism -