About Haiga
A reference
Haiga is a Japanese art form in which a brief poem — traditionally a haiku — is paired with a painted or drawn image. The two are composed as a single work: the image does not illustrate the poem, and the poem does not caption the image. Each leaves room for the other.
The form dates to seventeenth-century Japan, where haiku masters such as Bashō and Buson painted alongside their verse. The traditional haiga aesthetic favors suggestion over description: a few brushstrokes, an unfinished space, a poem that turns away just before its meaning closes.
The forms
The poems in this gallery take five forms. Each definition below is the working definition used throughout this site.
- Haiku
- A brief poem, Japanese in origin, that presents a moment of perception — typically grounded in nature or the seasons — often through the juxtaposition of two images.
- Senryu
- A brief poem in haiku form whose subject is human nature: foibles, irony, and social observation rather than the natural world.
- Zappai
- Miscellaneous short verse in the haiku tradition that plays outside the formal expectations of haiku and senryu — comic, experimental, or occasional.
- Katauta
- An ancient Japanese half-poem of three phrases (5-7-7), traditionally one side of a question-and-answer exchange. (The katauta room awaits its first work.)
- Aphorism
- A concise statement of a general truth or observation, compressed to the point of memorability. (Draft definition — pending review.)
Haiga in human–AI partnership
Every haiga on this site is made in a documented partnership between a human poet and an artificial intelligence, marked throughout the gallery with the characters 人＋機 — hito plus ki, human plus machine.
The poem is written by Winston Everlast. The image is developed with MidJourney across successive model versions, and the version used for each work is recorded as part of its provenance. This site maintains a seven-version chronicle documenting how the same poetic intention renders differently as the underlying model evolves.
The claim of this gallery is simple: the partnership does not dilute the tradition. Haiga has always been a dialogue between two arts. Here the dialogue includes a third voice, and the record of that conversation is part of the work.