Fusion of Calligraphy into Painting: The Making of Universal Abstract Art by Dōmoto Inshō

• In Event: Amateurism and the Art of Calligraphy in Postwar Japan

Abstract

In 1960s Japan, a group of calligraphic abstract paintings emerged in architectural settings, asserting monumentality and publicness as a new style designated to symbolize contemporary international human values and fit in Japan’s local social ethos. This study focuses on such paintings by Dōmoto Inshō (1891-1975), a specialist in Japan's neoclassic nihonga painting. Dōmoto critically explored his amateur admiration toward calligraphy when he found himself at odds with the domestic art establishment and wished to create universal art beyond the confines of local institutions. Unlike professionally-trained calligraphers who later took up abstract paintings, such as Shinoda Tōkō (1913- ), Dōmoto consciously developed his working methods, approaches to materials and use of techniques that ignored what had been cultivated in calligraphy and freely replaced it with conventions specific to painting.

The incentive to do so was Dōmoto's engagement with traditional East Asian art evaluation which did not differentiate between calligraphy and painting, but regarded them as one integrated category of shoga, calligraphy-painting. As an avid shoga collector, Dōmoto embraced this framing that had survived in the antique market and applied it to his creation of calligraphic painting, disregarding the fact that, among professionals practicing painting and calligraphy, the clear separation of the two fields was institutionally consolidated by the 1950s. At that time outside Japan, in the context of international interest towards Zen culture triggered by Suzuki Daisetsu, the fusion of calligraphy and painting also came to be revalued among Euro-American avant-garde artists and critics, with whom Dōmoto had direct contact.

Author

• Yasuko Tsuchikane, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures