Amateurism in the Work of Shirai Seiichi: from Architecture to Calligraphy

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

Abstract

For the architect Shirai Seiichi (1905-1983), amateurism was a deliberate creative strategy that engendered highly original works in both his profession of architecture and the art of calligraphy, the latter of which he took up in his late fifties as an intensive hobby that came to occupy the bulk of his time. As an architect, Shirai has been faulted by some critics for a lack of professional quality, which has often been attributed to his unconventional education and has fueled a polarized reception of his work. In calligraphy, he alternated between a rote emulation of masters such as Wang Xizhi and an unfettered exploration of his own expressive potential, resulting in a mixture of facsimile and autonomy that projected both an amateurism in brush technique and a will to adhere to orthodoxy in the shape and proportion of characters.

This paper aims to analyze the meanings and perceptions of amateurism in Shirai’s practices through the passage from architecture to calligraphy, in which the roles of production and labour are radically inverted and the locus of Shirai's aesthetic interest perversely shifts from the tectonic details of material and craftmanship to the creation of a kind of global gestalt that his buildings intentionally frustrate. My analysis will relate the theories of de- and re-skilling in avant-garde artistic practices to Peter Collins's historically wider-ranging critique of sincerity in architectural modernism and examine the challenges that Shirai's amateurism poses to both.

Author

• Maki Iisaka, Texas A&M University