Although the basic configuration of the folding screen has remained effectively unchanged into the 20th century, artists have experimented with media aside from the traditional painted silk and paper. At the domestic and international expositions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, screens were made from a variety of materials to highlight the nation’s technical quality in manufacturing.

In the 1960s, artists began to experiment more aggressively with a multitude of materials including varnish, iron plates, woodblock prints, ceramics, wood, and even digital media. Morita Shiryu’s Dragon Knows Dragon is a highly complex construction of metallic silver-colored paint on a black-paper ground that has been covered with a yellow varnish to make the characters appear as though they had been brushed with gold on black lacquer. Sasayama Tadayasu’s Red Rash is made from thin panels of ceramic clay covered with dots of red glaze—undertaken in collaboration with a tile manufacturing plant—and Okura Jiro’s Mountain Lake Screen Tachi is composed of black walnut planks that have been drilled and gouged, then covered with paint and gold leaf. For Okura and many contemporary artists producing screens, the change of media coincides with a move toward conceptually driven explorations of the format. Rather than seen as a support for a painted surface, such works emphasize the objecthood or sculptural quality of screens, and their ability to demarcate a space in a changeable installation.

_{Morita Shiryu. Dragon Knows Dragon (detail), 1969. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Fisher.}