Anātman

April 13, 2019-May 25, 2019

Artist / Inoue Yuichi

Text / Tai-Song Chen

The Calligraphy of Anātman —On the Calligraphic Works by Yuichi Inoue

How should we comprehend the almost unidentifiable or unexpected form of Yuichi Inoue’s calligraphic works? They were created at the climactic moments when calligraphy and painting merge into one via Inoue’s hand, and to distinguish the former from the latter is like herding cats. However, Inoue’s calligraphic works were by no means a manifestation of the age-old argument in Chinese art history, that is, calligraphy is homologous to painting, which was why this traditional aesthetic idea didn’t apply to his oeuvre. For example, Muga (Anātman), a “calligraphic painting” by Inoue displayed at the 4th São Paulo Art Biennial (1957) that shot him to fame, was hardly recognizable until we read its caption. To put it another way, it had nothing to do with calligraphic literacy, but aimed to liberate calligraphy from the character’s meaning it attached itself to, thereby transforming them into the articulation of an alternative meaning. What is the alternative meaning? To answer this question, we first of all need to review the calligraphic training Inoue underwent in Japan during the first half of the 20th century.

The Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered Japan in a new era of westernization and cultural modernization. Receiving no academic art training and experiencing this revolution when he was young, Inoue longed for Western modern art, which, after he secured his livelihood by teaching that covered his material needs, prompted him to enroll at a private art school to learn the fundamentals of Western painting at his own expense. In the period between 1935 and 1941 when Inoue devoted himself to learning painting, the “New Education Movement” introduced from the Occident (which had been in vogue for three decades till then) gradually declined owing to the rampant Japanese militarism. Fortunately, the Yokokawa Primary School at which Inoue taught still set great store by adaptive instruction and autonomous learning, exerting a profound and enduring influence on his freedom-oriented creative philosophy. Inoue’s artistic ethos found vivid expression in his calligraphic works as well as in his manifesto titled “The Liberation of Calligraphy” published in the art journal Bokubi (the beauty of ink). Criticizing with a revolutionary vision, he claimed to “subvert the feudalistic world of calligraphy” and liberate calligraphy from the rigid, skill-centered confines by highlighting the humanity and innocence of calligraphy. Published in 1952, this manifesto was a major landmark in his endeavor to create his sui generis calligraphic world. Nevertheless, a couple of crucial turning points and events occurring on Inoue around the wartime are worth mentioning before we proceed to discuss his career as a calligrapher.

First of all, teaching at school took Inoue too much time so that he had no choice but to give up learning Western painting halfway, which also deprived him of his inner sustenance. In 1941, the school’s headmaster Komokichi Hasegawa encouraged him to engage in the world of calligraphy out of his appreciation of the characters Inoue wrote. Calligraphic art thenceforth became Inoue’s passion of a lifetime. Secondly, sitting at the feet of Sokyu Ueda and then making friend with him in 1942, Inoue joined the modernist calligraphic community in which Ueda was an iconic figure. Weathering the storms of the alternating disintegration and integration in the postwar Japanese calligraphic world, this community’s ideological turbulence manifested itself in its monthly journal The Beauty of Calligraphy. Its successor Bokubi, a journal with a remarkable breadth of vision, was dedicated to establishing direct dialogues between calligraphy and Western modern art. Later, the Bokujinkai (the Association of Calligraphers) was founded out of disaffection with the system of the Japanese calligraphic world, criticizing Bokubi for it failed to get to the heart of calligraphy. Thirdly, Inoue experienced the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 when he was working a shift at the school. The school buildings were destroyed in the conflagration, and the students and staff suffered heavy casualties. Witnessing the horror committed by the enemy, Inoue went through severe trauma both physically and psychologically. He passed out on the site as a result of exposure to the thick smoke, and it was fortunate for him that he was rescued. Such a near-death experience gave birth to the essence of his calligraphic works. Four years later (1949), his father died. Legend has it that Inoue unwittingly began his career as a calligrapher when he was drawing the portrait of his deceased father. He depicted his father in a micro-comic style, with the calligraphy of a gāthā titled “Jiga-ge” from “The Eternal Lifespan of the Tathagata” (Seg. 16, Scroll V) and an excerpt from “The Treasure Stupa” (Seg. 11, Scroll IV) in the Lotus Sūtra as part of the composition. A couple of days later, he wrote the “Jiga-ge” again on paper with dilute ink, and pasted it on the internal side of the back plate of his home-made Buddhist niche as a way to commemorate his father. Six days later, Ueda sent Inoue a letter, urging him to partake in the 3rd Calligraphic Art Academy Exhibition scheduled to take place in the next year. As a result, Inoue submitted the calligraphic work he pasted in the Buddhist niche for review. This work was then selected and displayed, causing a sensation and receiving hordes of accolades, which signaled a promising start of his career as a calligrapher.

With regard to this calligraphic work, we seldom notice its material dimension as a consecration item. Inoue originally installed it in a Buddhist niche as a sacrifice for his father. It was blessed by the scent of incense, hence a dead ringer for a pneumatological object empowered after crossing the incense burner. Inoue not only created this Buddhist niche by himself, but frequently knelt and chanted “Jiga-ge” in front of it. However, we should neither construe “Jiga-ge” in this sense as non-art, nor define this gāthā as a religious item of the Buddhist School of Nichiren, otherwise we may restrict its connotations within set boundaries. The reason is quite simple: Inoue submitted it as a calligraphic work to the exhibition, for which he actually created another work, only to find that, by way of comparison, the new work is inferior to the one in the Buddhist niche. Artificial objects are always ideological or purposeful in nature, so was Inoue’s calligraphic work of “Jiga-ge.” It was a religious object at the outset, and was subsequently displayed at an exhibition. The artistic context thus added an extra dimension to this work. But then again, Inoue was already a calligrapher at the time. In this sense, both the calligraphic work of “Jiga-ge” as a sacrifice and the original version of the portrait of his father could be construed as Inoue’s calligraphic practice! This argument aims not so much to blur the boundary between religion and art as to explore the overarching force more fundamental than such differentiation. What is it exactly? Inoue claimed it to be the innermost being emerging from “ego” on the one hand and from his father’s spirit on the other. The former refers to venting his genuine feelings and his wholly devoted sacrifice to his father, while the latter implies that his father was the fountainhead of this calligraphic work. Inoue further underscored the significance of the innermost being, without which the production of any work of art would be impossible, meaning that artistic creation is not as easy as it looks.

What did Inoue mean by the innermost being? We may approximate its meaning by reference to the Buddhist School of Nichiren he followed, namely the great Japanese Buddhist scholar Nichiren’s argument in the 13th century: “I, Nichiren, have inscribed my life in sumi, so believe in the Gohonzon with your whole heart.” Inoue’s radical, rebellious and critical disposition manifested in his calligraphic style shall be partly attributed to his belief in the Buddhist School of Nichiren which enshrines the Lotus Sūtra as its canonical text and bears the imprint of Japanese culture. Such a disposition also found expression in his selection of characters. For instances, “To” (pagoda) is a kind of Buddhist building. Besides, he had created a total of 312 pieces of calligraphic work on the character “Hana” (flower) between 1957 and 1978, and these works carried multifold meanings, such as the illusion of falling flower petals before he passed out in the firebombing of Tokyo, his memory of his father’s religious devotion to the Lotus Sūtra, or his eldest daughter’ name Hanako given by him because he was fond of the word “Hana” (flower) on the plaque “Myo-ho-ke-kyo-ji” written by Japanese calligrapher Honami Koetsu (1558-1637). Moreover, the word “lotus” in the Lotus Sūtra is literally a variety of flower. The word “Hana” (flower), as a signifier, may admittedly refer to personal life experiences, just like Japanese poet Junzaburō Nishiwaki’s free associations and interpretations on it. Nevertheless, Inoue’s calligraphic works on this word also implied his long-term reading and practice of the Lotus Sūtra. We should even apply this implication to his famous calligraphic works on the word “Hin” (poverty) (64 in number), a fortiori the term“Gutetsu” (thorough disillusionment) that embodied his passionate spiritual pursuit of pure innocence and the harmony between Buddhism and Taoism.

Inoue’s oeuvre had been thought highly by the Western art world since the 4th São Paulo Art Biennial (1957), at which his works were put on a par with those by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, hence a constructive dialogue between Japanese modern calligraphy and Western abstract expressionism. In his book titled A Concise History of Modern Painting, British critic Herbert Read went into rhapsodies over Inoue’s oeuvre. The Western art world’s curiosity about Japanese calligraphy was also aroused as a result. Within this context, how can we properly evaluate his passionate yearning for the harmony between Buddhism and Taoism in terms of calligraphy? And how should we interpret his calligraphic works on the term of“Ippiki-Okami” (a lone wolf) created between 1968 and 1979 when he compared himself to a rebel?

Hosted by the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Qi Zhu in 2015, the exhibition titled The End of Modernity in Calligraphy: From Inoue Yuichi Inoue, Ufan Lee to Yu Zhang proposed a thought-provoking aesthetic framework. First of all, it regarded China, Korea and Japan as the members of a calligraphic art community, which is unquestionably true. What I would like to stress here is that the tremendous impact of Western modern art is not so much detrimental as contributory to the community, for the impact shattered the community’s artistic unity, from which calligraphic art regained the freedom that it’s supposed to enjoy. In other words, calligraphic art in this community transcended the rigid confines of ideologies and cultural conventions. To borrow Rosalind Krauss’ phrase in her criticism of American art in the 1960s and 1970s, “calligraphy in the expanded field” has been Japan’s contribution to the postwar reform of this community. In this expanded field, calligraphy is neither simply expressed on paper, nor shackled by sole medium or aesthetic criterion, but oriented towards multi-sensory experiments with different media. Accordingly, the real crux of the issue lies not so much in apotheosizing calligraphy or constraining its creative media and aesthetic quality as in inventing conceptual vocabulary so as to analyze, criticize or depict the contemporary cultural context in rheology. As a result, I conclude my remarks on the argument — Inoue intended to expand calligraphy into expressionistic painting — as follows.

Mentored by Ueda and inspired by Saburo Hasegawa’s technique and idea of Western avant-garde abstract art, Inoue indeed created some expressionistic calligraphy paintings in the early 1950s, and part of these works even took the form of collage or had painting-like compositions. Prominent critic Masaomi Unagami (who is also the author of Inoue’s biography) claimed that this brief period in Inoue’s career featured “enamel lacquer-based non-character.” Inoue, Masasyu Osawa, Hidai Nankoku, and even Sokyu Ueda were coevals of this school which “denies the literalist quality of calligraphy” and liberated the painterly nature of calligraphy. However, it was in this rapidly advancing, path-breaking period that the definition of calligraphy and its literalist quality continued to haunt these Japanese calligraphers’ mind. Inoue, in particular, created the work Gutetsu (thorough disillusionment) in 1957. This piece represented a significant landmark in his career, signaling his return to the literalist quality of characters, or, more specific, his dialectical return from abstract painting under the guidance of characters’ literalist quality. Here I give such dialectical return a simple formulation: calligraphy is not so much about reading characters’ semantic contents or grasping their meanings as about generating connotations in endless variation. It is a life-inspired conceptual art of characters that breaks away from the aesthetic value of “configuration” in traditional Chinese culture and converts to the philosophy of “the character imitating its natural self.” Take Inoue’s captivating calligraphic series on the characters of “Haha” (mother) (1961) and “Yume” (dream) (1967) as examples. Although their literalist quality was instantly apparent, they were completely deconstructed in terms of configuration. The viewers could recognize them only by reference to the piece most similar to the standard form in each series. That is to say, Inoue’s approach put a premium on the deconstruction of similarity, rendering his calligraphy — linear quasi-characters — more polysemous, complex and mercurial.

It is noteworthy that Inoue’s single-character calligraphic oeuvre has remained a dominant presence in Japan’s calligraphic world since 1957. These works have been exhibited in the company of titles and captions indicating the characters’ standard forms. Each work’s title and composition stand in a dialectical relationship to each other, in which his creative idea found expression. More important, Inoue tailored his ink by blending water-based glue with charcoal powder, and the effect became perceptible in his calligraphic works that convey a strong sense of materiality. By way of illustration, his works on the word “Jaku” (weakness) (1959) and the term “Chi Gu” (innocent wisdom) (1978) gave prominence to strokes in slow momentum as if written with overnight ink, rendering around thick-ink strokes, or gliding strokes due to the impermeability of the tailor-made ink. Such a sense of materiality was indissolubly linked with his body, and even displayed via his corporeal motions or the mise-en-scène of his calligraphic works. He drew an analogy between brushes (sometimes extra-large ones) and his limbs, writing in tandem with shouting. For example, he wrote the word“Kotsu” (bone) at the venue of a symposium in Hokkaido, Japan in 1959. His body was visibly tense and vehemently in motion, echoing Pollock’s “action painting.” Different from the meaning of “self,” the image that Inoue’s calligraphic works projected was “substantiality,” which was powerful and echoed his idea of “Muga” (anātman), because it referred to his calligraphic style and aesthetics rather than himself. In regard to the “Jiga-ge” he wrote and chanted, we shouldn’t misunderstand the characters “ji” and “ga” as a single term. Instead, the two characters should be grasped separately, meaning “emerging from substantiality.” Inoue had this epiphany of life out of his father’s demise and his narrow escape from death, and he tried to express it by means of calligraphy. A cultural strategy of calligraphic deployment and meaningful writing notwithstanding, Inoue’s creative approach was not intended to take the name of a great cultural cause as a shield and appeal to cultural fundamentalism insofar as to fight against Western modern art in a tragically moving, bombastic and phony manner. Rather, he canonized calligraphy as a ritual of “substantiality,” a “molecularized” (and ergo imperceptible) substantiality, to borrow Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical phrase. His substantiality transmuted into insubstantiality (anātman) after his narrow escape from death. What arose therefrom was his innermost being. To sum up, Inoue’s calligraphic oeuvre was an artistic incarnation of telepathy or affect, and his aesthetic practice of sublimating his life through calligraphy was nothing short of a Japanese-written chronicle of contemporary people manifested in this art form’s very modernity.

Tai-Song Chen, 7 March 2019, Taipei