Japanese Masters at Art Museum

A world at one stroke,
from an 18th Century husband and wife

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

The links between art and meditation (or even prayer), it has always seemed to me, are very strong. Moreover, these links always seem to function most strongly in the genre of landscape art, perhaps because here the artist is creating a world. The Art Museum’s current exhibit, featuring paintings and calligraphy of a talented husband and wife who lived in 18th Century Japan, only serves to strengthen me in this belief.

Ike Taiga practiced calligraphy from his youth and was early acclaimed as a master of the art. The pairing of painting and calligraphy may seem odd to some, but even a cursory examination of this exhibition will dispel any doubt. Taiga’s elegant ideograms and incisive brush strokes echo each other and merge beautifully into a unified work of art. I like to think that the same discipline required to guide the formation of each stroke in forming the ideogram also informed the lines that became stalks of bamboo, foliage and the gnarled sides of tall mountains.

Almost nothing there, and yet....

Taiga depicts an iris, and there’s almost nothing there—a few strokes on the paper, nothing more. Yet what is there is everything! The thing is achieved and set down before our eyes. Thus Taiga can create as rich an effect with a “close-up” like his view of Moonlight Bamboo, as he can with a panoramic view.

Taiga wrote poetry, and many of his works were inspired by passages of classical Chinese poetry. Much of his work seems to have been executed underwater—there is a blunted quality to it. You experience his landscapes almost as though you were dreaming them. While Taiga came to embrace a “true view” style later in his career, many of his celebrated works are, in fact, evocations of places he has never seen. The Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Li Po’s line, “The road to Shu is very steep,” becomes the occasion for the creation of a fantasia of rock-face, stunted trees, clouds and mist.

Painting without a brush

In another of Taiga’s works, Dragon Rising from Wind and Rain, the titular beast is barely visible through the swirling cauldron of elements, suggesting that this dragon is more force of nature than creature of flesh and blood. You can imagine how difficult it would be to achieve these techniques using brushes dipped in ink—not the most easily controllable of media. Yet Taiga created some of the works on display using a Chinese technique whereby no brush is used at all; instead only the fingertips, nails and palms of the hands are used to apply ink to paper. That makes his achievement all the more impressive.

In addition to paintings inspired by classical literature, Taiga painted mythological subjects as well as subjects inspired by Buddhism. Sometimes a humorous undercurrent infiltrates these works: In Taiga’s Five Sages, a gaggle of scholars are faced down by a rodent blocking their path.

Gyokuran’s work is more lyrical than her husband’s. She descended from a line of well-known poets, and her pieces seem more vibrant than Taiga’s. But whether we’re viewing Taiga’s works or those of Gyokuran, we come away with the conviction that they sat with and studied their subject—yes, even Taiga’s wholly imagined steep road to Shu—until it became a part of them. This is what gives Gyokuran’s work its immediacy and makes Taiga’s most dream-like visions undeniably a part of our world.