Haiga Galleries: haiga – a mix of image and haiku

Haigaonline Journal:

Daily Haiga Journal:

an’ya: Haiga Gallery

Pamela A. Babusci: Haiga Gallery

Ron Moss: Haiga Gallery

Nicole Hague-Andrews’ Haiga pages

Maria Tomczak: Haiga Gallery

Ray Rasmussen: A Covid Summer, 2020

[other haiga themes along with examples by other haiga practitioners will be added from time to time]

About Haiga

As is the case with haiku and haibun, contemporary English-language haiga is only recently adapted from the early and contemporary Japanese forms to fit Western poetic and artistic sensibilities. The internet is rife with pronouncements, prescriptions and orthodoxies about the relationship of image and haiku. Does the haiku serve as a metaphor for the image, or does it jump-shift to form an oblique association with the image, or does it simply serve as a kind of caption for the image? And the usual arguments about the haiku itself are also are in abundance, e.g., whether the haiku should be able to stand on its own, sans image. For now, it’s likely that English-language western haiga practice will continue to evolve and gain in practitioners.

While the original Japanese haiga were usually a combination of monochrome (grey-scale) brush paintings with kanji-type characters and calligraphy for the poems. Contemporary haiga as shown in various publications such as Haigaonline employ paintings of various media, photographic images and digital artworks.

In short, as with any evolving form, one hopes for creative image-making and pleasing to the eye artwork along with poems that are poetic and stimulating to the mind.

Asian practitioners employed a “chop” – a symbol representing the author. If well done, the chop itself has some beauty and lends an association with the lengthy tradition of Asian art.