tenkei 点景

Also tenkei jinbutsu 点景人物. Small-sized human figures and animals added as secondary elements to a landscape painting. The addition of such figures enlivens the scene and, in comparison to the towering landscape forms, their smallness lends a sense of the figures being immersed deep within the landscape. The comparison shows man in his proper, insignificant place in nature. Literati artists in both China and Japan often imagined themselves as one of these hermetic figures in the landscapes they created, especially when they were unable to live the kind of simple, uncomplicated life to which they aspired.