Books by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
Brill, Japanese Visual Culture Series 19, 2020
The Bokujinkai—or ‘People of the Ink’—was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers: ... more The Bokujinkai—or ‘People of the Ink’—was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers: Morita Shiryū, Inoue Yūichi, Eguchi Sōgen, Nakamura Bokushi, and Sekiya Yoshimichi. The avant-garde movement they launched aspired to raise calligraphy to the same level of international prominence as abstract painting. To this end, the Bokujinkai collaborated with artists from European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism, sharing exhibition spaces with them in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond. The first English-language book to focus on the postwar history of Japanese calligraphy, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde explains how the Bokujinkai rerouted the trajectory of global abstract art and attuned foreign audiences to calligraphic visualities and narratives.
https://brill.com/view/title/55005
Edited version of the discussions conducted at the International Symposium titled "Tradition and ... more Edited version of the discussions conducted at the International Symposium titled "Tradition and Transformation in Aesthetics of East Asian Calligraphy" held at the Noh Theater of Ryūtopia (Niigata City Performing Arts Center) on September 3rd and 4th, 2015.
Translation supervision of Shimatani Hiroyuki 島谷弘幸 (Kyushu National Museum Executive Director) article "Japanese Calligraphy and the Influence of Chinese Calligraphy". Pp. 296-334.
Papers by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
Trede, M., Guth, C., & Wakita, M. (Eds.). (02 Dec. 2024). Japanese Art – Transcultural Perspectives. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. , 2024
書学書道史研究 Calligraphic Studies 34, 2024
Raisonné of Morita Shiryū 1952-1998; 森田子龍全作品集 1952-1998, 2019
Ayelet Zohar and Alison J. Miller (ed.), The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity., 2021
Modernism/Modernity, 2020
This article studies the postwar modernization of Japanese calligraphy and the role that the mass... more This article studies the postwar modernization of Japanese calligraphy and the role that the mass media played in shaping the public perception of calligraphy as an avant-garde art form with affinities to action painting. In a rapidly globalizing postwar world, the new media of newspaper photography, television, and film made it easy to see analogies between artworks of different cultures. But while the affinities between Japanese calligraphy and action painting were noticed at the time, they have, with a few exceptions, been neglected in the scholarship. Calligraphy is mentioned as a source of inspiration for postwar abstract painters (Winther-Tamaki 2001 and 2009, Munroe 2009, Kachur 2007), but the tangled nexus between Japanese calligraphy and action painting, and the role that the media played in staging their encounter, has yet to be explored.
This paper builds on recent scholarly insights into the role of mass media in constructing the public image of the artist (e.g. studies of Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock), and extends this to a study of the media's role in staging transcultural encounters. Instead of focusing on the artworks, it brings new agents—photographers, art journalists, and filmmakers—into the picture to examine the role they played in shaping the calligraphers' performative practice and the public perception of their art. Examining the role that media professionals played in shaping the new public perception of calligraphy as an avant-garde practice and performative art, the paper shows how these developments advanced and dovetailed with the calligraphers' own modernizing agenda.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758312#info_wrap
The Power of Line (Munich: Hirmer, 2015), 2015
What features does a line possess? Is it just the length, as the geometers say? Is it length, thi... more What features does a line possess? Is it just the length, as the geometers say? Is it length, thickness, and structure, as painters suggest? Does it also have depth and speed, as calligraphers are convinced? How about expressivity and individuality, as Japanese philosophers tried to show in the 1950s and 1960s?
World Art, 2016
This paper discusses the relationship between postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphy and the ab... more This paper discusses the relationship between postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphy and the abstract art of the 1950s, showing how calligraphy contributed to the international postwar discussion of materiality. Postwar Japanese art – as exemplified by the art collectives Gutai and Mono-ha – is widely recognized for its close attention to materiality. This study will introduce Japanese avant-garde calligraphy into the discussion of materiality, examining the relationship between the avant-garde calligraphers’ use of traditional takuhon ink rubbings and the technically identical surrealist technique of frottage, invented in 1924 by Max Ernst as a way to implement ideas of automatism in art and to release the ‘material’ from conscious control. The first attempt to examine the encounter between Japanese calligraphy and surrealism, this study argues that when Japanese avant-garde calligraphers such as Inoue Yūichi (1916–85) and abstract painters such as Hasegawa Saburō (1906–57) began incorporating traditional takuhon ink rubbings into their active art practice in the 1950s, they introduced a new dimension of spirituality into the international discourse on materiality.
Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqe... more Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
This paper addresses ground-breaking experiments with materials and techniques by a new generation of postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, who, sharing a more reflective and innovative views on calligraphy's materials, set out to challenge calligraphy's conventional “four treasures”― ink, paper, ink stone and brush. This study argues that attention to materiality, as a large feature of postwar art worldwide, was used by calligraphers as a means to enter the art processes of the larger national and international scale. It served as a common ground for starting a conversation between several groups of artists, such as printmakers, abstract painters and calligraphers.
In particular, this study focuses on works of two Bokujinkai artist, Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and Shinoda Shōji (1927-2000). Inoue's experiments revived takuhon ink rubbings as a modern art medium. His cooperation with abstract painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō emphasized its relatedness to the surrealist technique of frottages by Max Ernst. At the same time, Shinoda integrated carved calligraphy into the avant-garde calligraphic practice, actively establishing a connection with the contemporaneous sōsaku hanga print makers, such as Onchi Koshirō and Munakata Shikō. While the phenomenon of avant-garde calligraphy in postwar art landscape of Japan recently inspired several studies, the specific role that the interest in materiality played in it remains understudied. By closing this gap, this paper specifically demonstrates that addressing a common issue of materiality helped the postwar calligraphers overcome boundaries between different art forms and contest the established art hierarchies.
Museum Network Fellowship Research Papers 2013, 2013
Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, Nov 2013
Modernism Beyond the West, pp. 41-63, Nov 2012
Conference Presentations by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
CAA Panel , 2021
Zen inspirations in modern and contemporary art are often linked to the postwar “Zen boom” in the... more Zen inspirations in modern and contemporary art are often linked to the postwar “Zen boom” in the United States, Europe, and Japan. However, it is necessary to acknowledge the diversity of several types of “Zen art” produced concurrently, along with their distinctive agencies and networks. While it is well-documented how lay Zen propagators, including D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, or Hisamatsu Shin’ichi reinterpreted and disseminated Zen globally, the art produced within the monastic Zen realm in modern Japan has received significantly less scholarly attention.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together art historians and religious studies scholars working on modern monastic Zen art, be it created by Zen monks, or commissioned by temples. This new focus articulates the connections between the modern monastic Zen and lay Zen (Zen of "Zen boom"), and the cross-currents between institutionalized Zen and secular avant-garde and modernisms. This panel includes presentations on the impact of art by Zen monk Sesson Shukei on Meiji painters (associated with an upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art); two talks dedicated to the Meiji-era Rinzai Zen monk Nantenbō Tōjū and his understanding of artistic agency as well as his impact on the postwar abstract art; and a talk on works by postwar avant- garde artist Dōmoto Inshō outside and inside of a Rinzai Zen temple Saihōji.
This discussion will provide new insights into the visual history of modern Zen in Japan by exploring the nexus between the secular and monastic modern Zen art historiographies and highlighting tensions between them.
panel at AAS Seattle , 2024
Within studies of East Asian calligraphy, modern period remains in the shadow of its premodern co... more Within studies of East Asian calligraphy, modern period remains in the shadow of its premodern counterpart, usually studied within the context of calligraphic legacy of each respective country. The suggestion of this panel, instead, is to look at modern East Asian calligraphies cross-regionally and as a part of the broader socio-political, historical and cultural transformations brought by modernization.
Countries of East Asia, each with their distinctive language, script and calligraphic cultures yet all intricately connected through the cultural gravity of the Sinosphere, went through separate paths of calligraphy and script modernization. While in Japan calligraphy became separated from the modern “bijutsu” fine arts modelled after the Western European system, this separation was less prevalent in China and Korea. Focusing on the complex histories of modern calligraphies in China, Japan and Korea from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century, this panel aims to better understand the role of calligraphy for forming modern cultural identities, and for navigating the tensions between the established cultural orders and newly emergent national and colonial agendas in the region.
By looking at transnational personal connections between prominent calligraphers (Wu Changshi and Kusakabe Meikaku), collecting practices (ink stones by Pak Yeongcheol), exhibition activities (by Japan’s Kōa shodō renmei in China), and reception networks (works of Qi Baishi in Japan), we investigate how calligraphic communities of East Asia challenged or reinforced the established hierarchies of the Sinocentric visual culture and contributed to the diverse experience of modernization in East Asia.
IAJS thematic conference, "The West in Japanese Imagination/Japan in Western Imagination", Tel Aviv, December 18-20, 2018, 2018
Modernization in Japan is often equaled to westernization. My paper, however, challenges this vie... more Modernization in Japan is often equaled to westernization. My paper, however, challenges this view, and presents another paradigm of modernization based on the rejection of westernization, instead oriented
towards reinforcing Japan’s connection with the East Asian continent.
The art of Japanese calligraphy presents a curious case for diversifying our understanding of the trajectories of post-Meiji cultural transformations in Japan. While it is often believed that calligraphy
remained untouched by modernization before the postwar heyday of avant-garde calligraphy (e.g. Munroe 1996), I argue that calligraphy’s postwar avant-garde was a product of a gradual reorientation process
within the calligraphic community triggered by the Meiji reforms. Yet calligraphy’s modernization remained unnoticeable to the outsiders until the late 1940s, due to being directed towards China rather than Europe or the United States.
Based on the study of legacy of the leading Meiji-era calligrapher Kusakabe Meikaku (1838-1922), this paper shows that for some artistic communities, such as Japanese calligraphers, Meiji Reforms became an
important truing point in terms of regaining access to the continental culture and reestablishing direct exchange with the Chinese counterparts, rather than exposure to European culture.
In the transforming postwar world, various forms of modernized calligraphic art appeared in the s... more In the transforming postwar world, various forms of modernized calligraphic art appeared in the spotlight of the international abstract art scene. Japanese avant-garde calligraphy was one of them and enjoyed unprecedented international attention and visibility. Works of calligraphers such as Hidai Nankoku (1912-1999), or Morita Shiryū (1912-1998) were exhibited alongside Euro-American abstract artists in many prestigious international art venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Paolo Biennale. For Japanese calligraphy, until then considered the most conservative of Japanese arts, this international attention was a sign of world recognition of Japan’s tradition and cultural past. Especially postwar Japanese calligraphers epitomized their art as a modern manifestation of East Asian wisdom and aesthetics within the perceived duality of “East and West”. However, following their initial international success, the Japanese calligraphers realized that their form of calligraphy was not the only reference for European and American abstractionists. Arabic calligraphy, only distantly familiar to Japanese calligraphers until then, became a point of comparison, interest, and rivalry. This talk will focus on the perception of Arabic calligraphy by Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, and on how this encounter triggered complex negotiations of the calligraphers’ identity. Based on discussions of Arabic calligraphy in the Japanese Bokubi journal, and on exhibitions where both calligraphies were presented, this talk will highlight how the encounter with the “calligraphic other” shaped modern Japanese calligraphy and its self-positioning in postwar art.
Panel: Amateurism and the Art of Calligraphy in Postwar Japan
This talk investigates the role of calligraphy in the oeuvre of two prominent Japanese postwar ar... more This talk investigates the role of calligraphy in the oeuvre of two prominent Japanese postwar artists: the ceramist Kitaōji Rosanjin (1883-1959) and the ikebana artist Teshigahara Sōfū (1900-1979). Through their examples, it scrutinizes the relationships between avant-garde ikebana, pottery, and calligraphy, and the transforming roles they played in the larger context of postwar Japanese art.
Both artists, Teshigahara and Rosanjin, were the most prominent figures in their respective fields, and strived for modernizing their arts, initiating the avant-gardization of ikebana and ceramics in the postwar decades. Both of them occasionally practiced and exhibited calligraphy, while highlighting its amateur features. But which type of calligraphy was particularly appealing to Rosanjin and Teshigahara? Did they prefer traditional or avant-garde calligraphic styles? How did their views of calligraphy relate to their own theories of modernity in ceramics and ikebana?
Focusing on Teshigahara's and Rosanjin's views concerning the professional calligraphic world, this talk will analyze their wish to stay outside of it. In this case, the self-identity and self-positioning of the artists as non-calligraphers is pivotal, since both of them would have had the necessary training to be considered professionals. Hence, their decision to be considered amateurs was a conscious choice. I will argue that Rosanjin's and Teshigahara's distancing from the professional calligraphic circles could be considered an attempt to create the image of modern literati scholars, who are skillful in the entire spectrum of the traditional arts, and express their artistic agenda through their synthesis.
Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqe... more Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
Avant-garde calligraphy, often mistaken for abstract painting by its contemporaries, is a rich and understudied field in postwar Japanese art. While a few studies began to examine the place of this art form in the postwar art landscape, specific aspects of this phenomenon warrant further investigation.
This paper argues that in the postwar decades the dynamics of calligraphy as an avant-garde “traditional art” became increasingly issue-driven, rather than remaining community oriented. This feature distinguished avant-garde calligraphers from their traditionalist counterparts. New important theoretical issues―such as attention to materiality―connected previously separated art forms and brought artists from neighboring fields into conversation.
An example of this development is the postwar perception of the medium of ink rubbings. In 1952 the Japanese abstract painter and art historian Hasegawa Saburō (1906 - 1957) created a series of rubbings, reminiscent of surrealist Frottages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976). In the very same year, the avant-garde calligrapher Inoue Yūichi (1916 - 1985) integrated calligraphic inscriptions into rubbings from tatami mats, and creative printmakers such as Onchi Koshirō (1891 - 1955) experimented with rubbings from stone, wood, or even leaves and shells. Calligraphers noticed that the success of ink rubbings was indebted to their quality of rendering traces of the direct physical contact with the imprinted objects. This paper investigates how the postwar interest in materiality incited the calligraphers to adopt the medium of takuhon rubbings—previously used primarily as a means of copying earlier calligraphic styles—to conduct groundbreaking calligraphic experiments.
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Books by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
https://brill.com/view/title/55005
Translation supervision of Shimatani Hiroyuki 島谷弘幸 (Kyushu National Museum Executive Director) article "Japanese Calligraphy and the Influence of Chinese Calligraphy". Pp. 296-334.
Papers by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
This paper builds on recent scholarly insights into the role of mass media in constructing the public image of the artist (e.g. studies of Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock), and extends this to a study of the media's role in staging transcultural encounters. Instead of focusing on the artworks, it brings new agents—photographers, art journalists, and filmmakers—into the picture to examine the role they played in shaping the calligraphers' performative practice and the public perception of their art. Examining the role that media professionals played in shaping the new public perception of calligraphy as an avant-garde practice and performative art, the paper shows how these developments advanced and dovetailed with the calligraphers' own modernizing agenda.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758312#info_wrap
https://www.imhof-verlag.de/julius-bissier-und-ostasien.html
In Connection to the Exhibition at the Museum of New Art In Freiburg, on view from May 19 to September 23, 2018.
https://www.freiburg.de/pb/,Lde/1163640.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
This paper addresses ground-breaking experiments with materials and techniques by a new generation of postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, who, sharing a more reflective and innovative views on calligraphy's materials, set out to challenge calligraphy's conventional “four treasures”― ink, paper, ink stone and brush. This study argues that attention to materiality, as a large feature of postwar art worldwide, was used by calligraphers as a means to enter the art processes of the larger national and international scale. It served as a common ground for starting a conversation between several groups of artists, such as printmakers, abstract painters and calligraphers.
In particular, this study focuses on works of two Bokujinkai artist, Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and Shinoda Shōji (1927-2000). Inoue's experiments revived takuhon ink rubbings as a modern art medium. His cooperation with abstract painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō emphasized its relatedness to the surrealist technique of frottages by Max Ernst. At the same time, Shinoda integrated carved calligraphy into the avant-garde calligraphic practice, actively establishing a connection with the contemporaneous sōsaku hanga print makers, such as Onchi Koshirō and Munakata Shikō. While the phenomenon of avant-garde calligraphy in postwar art landscape of Japan recently inspired several studies, the specific role that the interest in materiality played in it remains understudied. By closing this gap, this paper specifically demonstrates that addressing a common issue of materiality helped the postwar calligraphers overcome boundaries between different art forms and contest the established art hierarchies.
Conference Presentations by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
This interdisciplinary panel brings together art historians and religious studies scholars working on modern monastic Zen art, be it created by Zen monks, or commissioned by temples. This new focus articulates the connections between the modern monastic Zen and lay Zen (Zen of "Zen boom"), and the cross-currents between institutionalized Zen and secular avant-garde and modernisms. This panel includes presentations on the impact of art by Zen monk Sesson Shukei on Meiji painters (associated with an upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art); two talks dedicated to the Meiji-era Rinzai Zen monk Nantenbō Tōjū and his understanding of artistic agency as well as his impact on the postwar abstract art; and a talk on works by postwar avant- garde artist Dōmoto Inshō outside and inside of a Rinzai Zen temple Saihōji.
This discussion will provide new insights into the visual history of modern Zen in Japan by exploring the nexus between the secular and monastic modern Zen art historiographies and highlighting tensions between them.
Countries of East Asia, each with their distinctive language, script and calligraphic cultures yet all intricately connected through the cultural gravity of the Sinosphere, went through separate paths of calligraphy and script modernization. While in Japan calligraphy became separated from the modern “bijutsu” fine arts modelled after the Western European system, this separation was less prevalent in China and Korea. Focusing on the complex histories of modern calligraphies in China, Japan and Korea from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century, this panel aims to better understand the role of calligraphy for forming modern cultural identities, and for navigating the tensions between the established cultural orders and newly emergent national and colonial agendas in the region.
By looking at transnational personal connections between prominent calligraphers (Wu Changshi and Kusakabe Meikaku), collecting practices (ink stones by Pak Yeongcheol), exhibition activities (by Japan’s Kōa shodō renmei in China), and reception networks (works of Qi Baishi in Japan), we investigate how calligraphic communities of East Asia challenged or reinforced the established hierarchies of the Sinocentric visual culture and contributed to the diverse experience of modernization in East Asia.
towards reinforcing Japan’s connection with the East Asian continent.
The art of Japanese calligraphy presents a curious case for diversifying our understanding of the trajectories of post-Meiji cultural transformations in Japan. While it is often believed that calligraphy
remained untouched by modernization before the postwar heyday of avant-garde calligraphy (e.g. Munroe 1996), I argue that calligraphy’s postwar avant-garde was a product of a gradual reorientation process
within the calligraphic community triggered by the Meiji reforms. Yet calligraphy’s modernization remained unnoticeable to the outsiders until the late 1940s, due to being directed towards China rather than Europe or the United States.
Based on the study of legacy of the leading Meiji-era calligrapher Kusakabe Meikaku (1838-1922), this paper shows that for some artistic communities, such as Japanese calligraphers, Meiji Reforms became an
important truing point in terms of regaining access to the continental culture and reestablishing direct exchange with the Chinese counterparts, rather than exposure to European culture.
Both artists, Teshigahara and Rosanjin, were the most prominent figures in their respective fields, and strived for modernizing their arts, initiating the avant-gardization of ikebana and ceramics in the postwar decades. Both of them occasionally practiced and exhibited calligraphy, while highlighting its amateur features. But which type of calligraphy was particularly appealing to Rosanjin and Teshigahara? Did they prefer traditional or avant-garde calligraphic styles? How did their views of calligraphy relate to their own theories of modernity in ceramics and ikebana?
Focusing on Teshigahara's and Rosanjin's views concerning the professional calligraphic world, this talk will analyze their wish to stay outside of it. In this case, the self-identity and self-positioning of the artists as non-calligraphers is pivotal, since both of them would have had the necessary training to be considered professionals. Hence, their decision to be considered amateurs was a conscious choice. I will argue that Rosanjin's and Teshigahara's distancing from the professional calligraphic circles could be considered an attempt to create the image of modern literati scholars, who are skillful in the entire spectrum of the traditional arts, and express their artistic agenda through their synthesis.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
Avant-garde calligraphy, often mistaken for abstract painting by its contemporaries, is a rich and understudied field in postwar Japanese art. While a few studies began to examine the place of this art form in the postwar art landscape, specific aspects of this phenomenon warrant further investigation.
This paper argues that in the postwar decades the dynamics of calligraphy as an avant-garde “traditional art” became increasingly issue-driven, rather than remaining community oriented. This feature distinguished avant-garde calligraphers from their traditionalist counterparts. New important theoretical issues―such as attention to materiality―connected previously separated art forms and brought artists from neighboring fields into conversation.
An example of this development is the postwar perception of the medium of ink rubbings. In 1952 the Japanese abstract painter and art historian Hasegawa Saburō (1906 - 1957) created a series of rubbings, reminiscent of surrealist Frottages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976). In the very same year, the avant-garde calligrapher Inoue Yūichi (1916 - 1985) integrated calligraphic inscriptions into rubbings from tatami mats, and creative printmakers such as Onchi Koshirō (1891 - 1955) experimented with rubbings from stone, wood, or even leaves and shells. Calligraphers noticed that the success of ink rubbings was indebted to their quality of rendering traces of the direct physical contact with the imprinted objects. This paper investigates how the postwar interest in materiality incited the calligraphers to adopt the medium of takuhon rubbings—previously used primarily as a means of copying earlier calligraphic styles—to conduct groundbreaking calligraphic experiments.
https://brill.com/view/title/55005
Translation supervision of Shimatani Hiroyuki 島谷弘幸 (Kyushu National Museum Executive Director) article "Japanese Calligraphy and the Influence of Chinese Calligraphy". Pp. 296-334.
This paper builds on recent scholarly insights into the role of mass media in constructing the public image of the artist (e.g. studies of Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock), and extends this to a study of the media's role in staging transcultural encounters. Instead of focusing on the artworks, it brings new agents—photographers, art journalists, and filmmakers—into the picture to examine the role they played in shaping the calligraphers' performative practice and the public perception of their art. Examining the role that media professionals played in shaping the new public perception of calligraphy as an avant-garde practice and performative art, the paper shows how these developments advanced and dovetailed with the calligraphers' own modernizing agenda.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758312#info_wrap
https://www.imhof-verlag.de/julius-bissier-und-ostasien.html
In Connection to the Exhibition at the Museum of New Art In Freiburg, on view from May 19 to September 23, 2018.
https://www.freiburg.de/pb/,Lde/1163640.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
This paper addresses ground-breaking experiments with materials and techniques by a new generation of postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, who, sharing a more reflective and innovative views on calligraphy's materials, set out to challenge calligraphy's conventional “four treasures”― ink, paper, ink stone and brush. This study argues that attention to materiality, as a large feature of postwar art worldwide, was used by calligraphers as a means to enter the art processes of the larger national and international scale. It served as a common ground for starting a conversation between several groups of artists, such as printmakers, abstract painters and calligraphers.
In particular, this study focuses on works of two Bokujinkai artist, Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and Shinoda Shōji (1927-2000). Inoue's experiments revived takuhon ink rubbings as a modern art medium. His cooperation with abstract painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō emphasized its relatedness to the surrealist technique of frottages by Max Ernst. At the same time, Shinoda integrated carved calligraphy into the avant-garde calligraphic practice, actively establishing a connection with the contemporaneous sōsaku hanga print makers, such as Onchi Koshirō and Munakata Shikō. While the phenomenon of avant-garde calligraphy in postwar art landscape of Japan recently inspired several studies, the specific role that the interest in materiality played in it remains understudied. By closing this gap, this paper specifically demonstrates that addressing a common issue of materiality helped the postwar calligraphers overcome boundaries between different art forms and contest the established art hierarchies.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together art historians and religious studies scholars working on modern monastic Zen art, be it created by Zen monks, or commissioned by temples. This new focus articulates the connections between the modern monastic Zen and lay Zen (Zen of "Zen boom"), and the cross-currents between institutionalized Zen and secular avant-garde and modernisms. This panel includes presentations on the impact of art by Zen monk Sesson Shukei on Meiji painters (associated with an upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art); two talks dedicated to the Meiji-era Rinzai Zen monk Nantenbō Tōjū and his understanding of artistic agency as well as his impact on the postwar abstract art; and a talk on works by postwar avant- garde artist Dōmoto Inshō outside and inside of a Rinzai Zen temple Saihōji.
This discussion will provide new insights into the visual history of modern Zen in Japan by exploring the nexus between the secular and monastic modern Zen art historiographies and highlighting tensions between them.
Countries of East Asia, each with their distinctive language, script and calligraphic cultures yet all intricately connected through the cultural gravity of the Sinosphere, went through separate paths of calligraphy and script modernization. While in Japan calligraphy became separated from the modern “bijutsu” fine arts modelled after the Western European system, this separation was less prevalent in China and Korea. Focusing on the complex histories of modern calligraphies in China, Japan and Korea from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century, this panel aims to better understand the role of calligraphy for forming modern cultural identities, and for navigating the tensions between the established cultural orders and newly emergent national and colonial agendas in the region.
By looking at transnational personal connections between prominent calligraphers (Wu Changshi and Kusakabe Meikaku), collecting practices (ink stones by Pak Yeongcheol), exhibition activities (by Japan’s Kōa shodō renmei in China), and reception networks (works of Qi Baishi in Japan), we investigate how calligraphic communities of East Asia challenged or reinforced the established hierarchies of the Sinocentric visual culture and contributed to the diverse experience of modernization in East Asia.
towards reinforcing Japan’s connection with the East Asian continent.
The art of Japanese calligraphy presents a curious case for diversifying our understanding of the trajectories of post-Meiji cultural transformations in Japan. While it is often believed that calligraphy
remained untouched by modernization before the postwar heyday of avant-garde calligraphy (e.g. Munroe 1996), I argue that calligraphy’s postwar avant-garde was a product of a gradual reorientation process
within the calligraphic community triggered by the Meiji reforms. Yet calligraphy’s modernization remained unnoticeable to the outsiders until the late 1940s, due to being directed towards China rather than Europe or the United States.
Based on the study of legacy of the leading Meiji-era calligrapher Kusakabe Meikaku (1838-1922), this paper shows that for some artistic communities, such as Japanese calligraphers, Meiji Reforms became an
important truing point in terms of regaining access to the continental culture and reestablishing direct exchange with the Chinese counterparts, rather than exposure to European culture.
Both artists, Teshigahara and Rosanjin, were the most prominent figures in their respective fields, and strived for modernizing their arts, initiating the avant-gardization of ikebana and ceramics in the postwar decades. Both of them occasionally practiced and exhibited calligraphy, while highlighting its amateur features. But which type of calligraphy was particularly appealing to Rosanjin and Teshigahara? Did they prefer traditional or avant-garde calligraphic styles? How did their views of calligraphy relate to their own theories of modernity in ceramics and ikebana?
Focusing on Teshigahara's and Rosanjin's views concerning the professional calligraphic world, this talk will analyze their wish to stay outside of it. In this case, the self-identity and self-positioning of the artists as non-calligraphers is pivotal, since both of them would have had the necessary training to be considered professionals. Hence, their decision to be considered amateurs was a conscious choice. I will argue that Rosanjin's and Teshigahara's distancing from the professional calligraphic circles could be considered an attempt to create the image of modern literati scholars, who are skillful in the entire spectrum of the traditional arts, and express their artistic agenda through their synthesis.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full
Avant-garde calligraphy, often mistaken for abstract painting by its contemporaries, is a rich and understudied field in postwar Japanese art. While a few studies began to examine the place of this art form in the postwar art landscape, specific aspects of this phenomenon warrant further investigation.
This paper argues that in the postwar decades the dynamics of calligraphy as an avant-garde “traditional art” became increasingly issue-driven, rather than remaining community oriented. This feature distinguished avant-garde calligraphers from their traditionalist counterparts. New important theoretical issues―such as attention to materiality―connected previously separated art forms and brought artists from neighboring fields into conversation.
An example of this development is the postwar perception of the medium of ink rubbings. In 1952 the Japanese abstract painter and art historian Hasegawa Saburō (1906 - 1957) created a series of rubbings, reminiscent of surrealist Frottages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976). In the very same year, the avant-garde calligrapher Inoue Yūichi (1916 - 1985) integrated calligraphic inscriptions into rubbings from tatami mats, and creative printmakers such as Onchi Koshirō (1891 - 1955) experimented with rubbings from stone, wood, or even leaves and shells. Calligraphers noticed that the success of ink rubbings was indebted to their quality of rendering traces of the direct physical contact with the imprinted objects. This paper investigates how the postwar interest in materiality incited the calligraphers to adopt the medium of takuhon rubbings—previously used primarily as a means of copying earlier calligraphic styles—to conduct groundbreaking calligraphic experiments.
The two approaches most commonly employed in recent scholarship of such avant-garde formations are investigating them in relation to hierarchical European concepts of “art” and “high culture” and in contrast with practices that are represented as being authoritative exemplars of venerable unchanging practices of the past. This panel takes a different tack; postwar avant-garde art forms are scrutinized within a horizontal paradigm of art experiments sharing three essential features in different media: a common time frame, a similar social and gender structure (often they are perceived as leisure activities of upper middle class women), and the same structural pattern (they incorporated elements from modern Euro-American 'high arts' into various forms associated with Japanese tradition).
Furthermore, this panel seeks to develop a common understanding of the term “avant-garde” (“zen'ei”) within the context of “traditional arts”. How does this concept relate to the conventional practices of calligraphy, ikebana or the tea ceremony, as well as to other Japanese and international postwar avant-garde movements in painting, sculpture or performances?
In the beginning of the 1950s, seemingly independently from each other, the two art forms started demonstrating an increasing interest in the dynamic and performative dimension of the art-creation. Alongside Jackson Pollock’s famous action painting, the performances by Georges Matthieu and the large-scale calligraphy shows by Morita Shiryū and Inoue Yūichi formed a significant transcultural movement in the postwar art. Within this movement, the process of art creation was valued at least equally as high as its product.
Each of the participants of this multi-lateral art trend claimed the cultural antecedence for this phenomenon. In their argumentation calligraphers invoked the legendary crazy-cursive tradition which goes back to the Tang-dynasty China and passes down legends about calligraphers writing with their hands and hair on white walls. The Euro-American artists, in
their turn, claimed that their art was embedded solely in the theoretical corpus of modernism and avant-garde theories and drew its inspiration from the modernist interest in the primary components of art creation.
Through an in-depth analysis of both visual and theoretical sides of this transcultural art dialogue this talk shall try to disentangle the mutual inspirations and influences that took
place between Japanese calligraphers and Euro-American painters and caused the development of the “performative abstraction” phenomenon in postwar art.
What makes Franz Kline’s “October Day” a painting, and Inoue Yūichi’s abstract “Work A” a calligraphy? When a piece of calligraphy and the lines that form it are not based on a character any more and are thus not predetermined by orthographic rules, can it still be claimed that the lines’ qualities classify them as either painterly or calligraphic? And
even more: can calligraphic lines create a painterly art space, and vice versa?
This essential discussion was initiated by the Bokujinkai calligraphy group, who saw its main aim at bringing calligraphy to equal terms with contemporaneous Euro-American abstract
painting. They thus first felt the need to theoretically delimit the basic common elements between painting and calligraphy: line and space. In their argumentation Bokujinkai were often appealing to classical calligraphy theories, such as the “bones and flesh” of the line, the time dimension of calligraphy, the line depth, and so on.
The aim of this talk will be to analyze how and with which means the avant-garde calligraphers instrumentalized a line in order to justify the separation of abstract painting and
abstract calligraphy. What was their particular application of classical theories to modern abstract art, and its outcome?
I will analyze their discussion of the relation and (dis)similarities between the nature of simplification and the further abstraction of the subject matter both in the Sino-Japanese ideographic script and in the primitivist painting, before reflecting on the motivations underlying such argumentation. I will further relate this theory to the calligraphers’ struggle to process calligraphy’s entering the realm of abstraction in the early 1950s and its subsequent expel from there by painting. In my analysis I will investigate whether their theory can be considered an attempt to claim calligraphy’s historical and cultural primacy over painting in reaching the dimension of abstraction.
Finally I will discuss the supportive theory of “East and West in Arts” by the Japanese painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō, who closely cooperated with the Bokujinkai group. In his theory he tried to create links between “old Japanese” and “new Western” arts. I will analyze the degree of his contribution to Bokujinkai’s ideas and try to indentify his agenda as an abstract painter.
haben: (i) kurz nach der Meiji-Restauration, und (ii) in dem Jahrzehnt nach dem Krieg. Dabei werde ich mich auf die Selbstwahrnehmungen der japanischen Kalligraphen fokussieren, und auf deren Suche nach ihrem Platz im System der japanischen Kunst.
Im ersten Teil des Vortrags wird die Stellung besprochen, der der japanischen Kalligrafie nach der Kreation des Begriffes bijutsu zugewiesen wurde. Ebenso soll auch die Art und
Weise erörtert werden, wie diese spezifische Positionierung die Entwicklung dieser Kunstform für die nächsten Dekade, sowie die „Konservierung“ der existierenden Kunstpraktiken, vorherbestimmte. Wie verstanden d ie Kalligraphen, z.B. Nakabayashi Gochiku, Kusakabe Meikaku oder Iwaya Ichiroku, ihre Rolle in dem neudefinierten System
der Kunst? Wie wurde die Grenzlinie zwischen Kalligraphie und Malerei gezogen, die von nun an diese zwei ursprünglich sehr nahen Erscheinungen der ostasiatischen Kunst (vor allem
wenn wir an die Tuschemalerei denken) trennen sollte, und wie wurde sie im späten 19. Jh. wahrgenommen?
Der zweite Teil des Vortrags ist der Neudefinitionen der Zusammenhänge zwischen Kalligraphie und Malerei vom Standpunkt der avantgardistischen Kalligraphen der
Nachkriegszeit gewidmet. Die Fragestellung soll anhand des Beispiels der Kalligraphen aus der Bokujinkai-Gruppe, u.a. von Morita Shiryū und Inoue Yūichi dargestellt werden. Im Fokus liegen ihre Bestrebungen, die japanische Kalligraphie in den weltweiten Kontext der abstakten Kunst zu integrieren, insbesondere durch den Austausch mit der abstrakten Malerei
aus den USA und Europa. Wie haben die nachkriegszeitlichen Kalligraphen ihre Rolle und Aufgabe innerhalb der japanischen Kunstszene verstanden, und wie hat es sich von der
Verständnis der früheren Generationen der Kalligraphen unterschieden?
Das allgemeine Thema des Vortrags sind die vielfältigen Beziehungen „Kunst-Malerei-Kalligraphie”, anhand der Beispiele aus zwei zeitlichen Abschnitten in der Geschichte der japanischen Kalligraphie, Ziel ist es sie miteinander kontrastieren und vergleichen, z.B. die „Abgrenzung“ der Kalligraphie vom Rest der Kunstformen in der Meiji-Zeit, und die Versuche sie in den Nachkriegsjahrzehnten in die globalen Kunstprozesse zu inkorporieren.
So soll gezeigt werden, wie eine Ostasien-spezifische Kunstform versucht hat, sich an die Situation anzupassen, in der es nicht in das Feld von bijutsu eingeschlossen war, und was die Strategien der Kalligraphen waren damit umzugehen.
The aim of this paper will be to study and compare the positions towards the definition and role allotted to the Japanese calligraphy in the postwar world art, as well as understandings of calligraphy’s ways for “modernization” and “transformation”, as seen by key agents involved in the artistic dialogue between Japanese calligraphy and Euro-American painting in the postwar decades. I will be interested not only in the opinions of the Bokujinkai members (such as Morita, Inoue and Eguchi Sōgen), but also of the abstract painters from the US (such as Franz Kline and Mark Tobey), Europe (e.g. of Pierre Alechinski and Julius Bissier), and Japan (first of all Hasegawa Saburō and Yoshihara Jirō). My ultimate goal will be to try to disentangle the art discourses underlying the formation of the avant-garde calligraphy (as it is understood today) by singling out and analyzing individual voices and standpoints of interacting artists and art theoreticians who directly or indirectly participated in its configuration.