Ink Painting and the Fashioned Self

168｜ Ink Painting and the Fashioned Self Yukio Lippit Harvard University Among the many notable ink paintings found in the Gitter-Yelen “Drunkenville” refers to a prose piece by the Sui and early Tang dynasty Collection is a diminutive work by the Japanese literati painter Uragami poet Wang Ji (590–644) titled “he Story of Drunkenville” (Zuixiang ji Gyokudō 1) (1745–1820) titled Spring Haze (ig. 1). Adopting a proile not uncommon among his late works, the painting depicts a dense 醉郷記). Wang Ji, also called “Mr. Five Dippers” for the large quantities of wine he consumed, was known for his poetry extolling the virtues and abstract landscape entirely in monochrome ink, surrounded by a of wine and inebriation in the tradition of Ruan Ji (210–63) and Tao small roundel frame and built up through an accumulation of short, Qian (365?–427). In “The Story of Drunkenville” Wang describes an mostly dry brush strokes. The composition is habitual to Gyokudō: ideal, faraway kingdom in which the weather is always pleasant, the a tiny figure crosses a bridge right of center, making his way towards people free of desire and lacking of emotions, living naturally among the a mountain village, nestled amidst tall trees in the foreground and animals, free of material goods. In this enchanted land the stupefaction soaring, irreal peaks in the background. The single traveler imbues an induced by wine is conceptualized as a condition likened to naturalness, otherwise miniature pictorial surface with a sense of monumental scale and cosmic solitude (see entry no. 77 in catalogue).2) As with most emancipation, and harmony with the ever-changing Way, and relects a 6) kinship with the foundational principles of classical philosophical texts Gyokudō paintings, a four-character title in the upper let-hand corner, such as the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. Drunkenville is also an allegory for a literally reading “Spring Clouds, Indistinct” (shun’un moko 春雲模糊), both calibrates the landscape seasonally and proposes that this stroke- wisely governed state; as such it has political overtones as a part of Wang scape be read as a momentary pictorial capture of a metamorphic, evertransmogrifying world.3) Although Spring Haze is deserving of a much longer exposition, from, given his own background as a member of the warrior class who later shed his domainal ailiation.7) Ultimately Drunkenville is both an imaginary realm and a state of interiority. By invoking this state of mind in here I would like to call attention to the seal that is impressed along his seal name, Gyokudō is participating in a rhetoric of drunkenness that with the signature “Gyokudō” in the upper left-hand corner (fig. 2). Reading “Suikyō” 醉郷 in Japanese, the rectangular intaglio seal, pressed has been an important component of East Asian cultural representation since the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE).8) hat Gyokudō was fully upside down in this case, can be translated as “Drunkenville.” The seal aware of the cultural semantics of the tradition of which Wang Ji was a is commonly found on works from Gyokudō’s final decade of activity, part is also suggested by the title of his autobiography, “Notes Scribbled the 1810s, and is one of a number of his seals that have been preserved to the present day.4) Like those of many other painters, Gyokudō’s on the Wall of the Jade Hall” (Mizukara Gyokudō no kabe ni shirusu), seals collectively offer many insights into the artist’s self-conception, Ji’s “opposition poetics,” which Gyokudō may have taken inspiration which invokes Wang’s “Eight Quatrains Scribbled on Tavern Walls” (Ti jiudian loubi jueju ba shou). conveying sobriquets and phrases such as “Drunken Immortal” (Suisen 醉仙 ), “Great Antiquity” (Taiko 太古 ), “Qin Master” (Kin’ō 琹王 ), “White-Bearded Qin Player” (Hakuhatsu Kinshi 白髯琹士), “Descendant faire inkwork evoke the naturalness and spontaneity idealized in this of the Minister Takeuchi” (Takeuchi Daijin no Mago 武内大臣之孫), figure is heading as Drunkenville itself; rather than marking a literal and so forth. he “Drunkenville” seal, however, is more enlightening than representation, however, the real significance of the seal lies in the most because it opens up onto a dimension of Gyokudō’s artistry that suggestion that the painting relects an internalization of the state of mind has been under-appreciated, his rhetorical or metaphorical adoption of invoked by this cultural topos. Even the clumsy hand-drawn roundel a drunken persona in his painting and poetry. Gyokudō is considered frame conveys this impression, as does the fact that the “Drunkenville” the intoxicated painter par excellence, and many accounts from his own seal is pressed upside down. It is important to note, however, that the facture and presentation of Spring Landscape are as much a carefully time describe the stupor in which he oten put brush to paper, accounts In Spring Haze, Gyokudō’s loose brushwork and laisseztradition. We might even imagine the rootops towards which the lone that are further echoed in many of his own signatures, poems, and inscriptions.5) The seal name “Drunkenville,” however, demonstrates designed affect of tippling as a physiological outcome of it. This is not that Gyokudō was not merely an incorrigible inebriant, but rather accounts Gyokudō seems to have consumed more than his fair share. someone highly aware of historical projections of a tipsy self in cultural The controlled manner in which he did so, however, suggests that he imbibed with the full awareness that he was participating in a long- representation, as well as the philosophical allegiances that these implied. regy|後付.indd 168 to say that Gyokudō did not partake of wine; on the contrary, by all 10.8.2 4:01:35 PM Returning Home: Edo Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection standing poetics of inebriation, and that through his creative output he Yet the further acceptance of modern art in the public sphere was not only performing the drunkard, but assuming the posture of one led eventually to an appreciation of ink paintings as a sophisticated who had achieved a kind of “ultimate sobriety.” 9) *** arena of self-fashioning, or “self-expression.” During the postwar period, The medium of ink painting itself played an important role in enabling Gyokudō’s performance of the flushed artist. The many different textures found in Spring Haze, its panoply of ink tones and stroke qualities, all achieve a careful balance between masterful execution furthermore, the Cold War played a role in further privileging this kind of creativity in the West as an antithesis to the supposed Communist instrumentalization of the individual. 15) At the same time, the appropriation of Zen Buddhism in American counterculture established and the appearance of motor incoordination. In analytical terms, this Japanese Zenga as one of the premier genres in which personhood was understood to be mediated by painting.16) It was in this context that the impression can only be captured oxymoronically, as something like Giter-Yelen collection irst took shape, and came to consist of so many rigorous nonchalance, mindful unconcern, or attentive indiscretion. compelling examples of works in ink. In East Asian painting discourse, however, this could be understood as It is no surprise that many of these works originated in Japan’s early modern era, which proved to be a rich context for artistic self- the method of “non-method” ( J. muhō), a designation that privileged deskilling as a means of conveying true amateurism and authenticity.10) Gyokudō’s methodical embrace of methodlessness, as seen in Spring fashioning through the medium of ink, especially so in eighteenthcentury Kyoto. Among other factors, this had to do with the transposition Haze and other works, resulted in some of the highest achievements of continental cultural practices through the Obaku sect of Buddhism, in the history of Japanese painting. And combined with Gyokudō’s the emergence of literati painting culture, and the brush arts of itinerant own inscriptions and accounts by contemporaries, this self-negating facture was cumulatively experienced as a convincing portrait of artistic Zen monk-painters who popularized traditional Buddhist subjects and maxims.17) The resulting convergence led to a wide new range of insobriety. Indeed, throughout the history of East Asian pictorial archetypal selves that could be intimated through brush and ink, and representation, ink painting was understood to be a privileged medium many novel efects generated by artists pursuing such pictorial personas, for personations of many different kinds: the tippler-hermit, the mad which included the scholarly amateur, the eccentric, the noble recluse, artist, the scholar-amateur, the noble recluse, the Daoist nihilist, and the querying wise man, or the drunken artist. he later disposition was more. adopted by many painters other than Gyokudō, although he became its This tradition of emphatic self-fashioning in painting was most distinguished embodiment. On display for the present exhibition, much older in East Asia than in the West, where arguably it would not be a familiar part of the pictorial arts until the modern era.11) hus Kameda Bōsai’s (1752–1826) Gourd (no. 102) depicts a motif closely associated with wine-drinking and explains in its signature how it was among Euro-American commentators it was only in the modern era painted by the “peaceful drinker” Bōsai; the gourd is accordingly warped that personation itself came to be one of the qualities most recognized under the inluence of spirits. And although the Giter-Yelen Collection and prized in East Asian painting; in earlier times it was primarily the includes a rare self-portrait by a premodern Japanese painter in Tachihara technical aspects of ink painting that captured interest. he British artist Alexander Cozens (1717–86), for example, was understood to have Kyōsho’s Literatus Painting a Landscape (no. 101), selfhood was more commonly expressed through the cultivation of particularized pictorial been influenced by East Asian pictorial traditions in his conception of modes. These could be as varied as those found in Yokoi Kinkoku’s his “new method,” in which picturesque landscapes were developed out of blots (fig. 3).12) In the modern era, Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Itō Jakuchū’s Moon and Plum (no. 8). As in the case of Gyokudō, extolled the contrasts of light and dark generated by ink wash—centered however, a full experience of the painting necessarily involves an around the Japanese term nōtan—as a universal design principle, one that became inluential in American art education through his disciple awareness of the painters’ personas conveyed either in their inscriptions Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922).13) Unaware of the characterology operative in its original contexts, such commentators saw in ink painting who was also an ordained priest of the Shugendō sect of mountain 14) new possibilities for innovative picture-making. regy|後付.indd 169 ｜169 Winter-Autumn Landscape (no. 75), Ike Taiga’s Lake Landscape (no. 67), or seals on each of these paintings. hus Yokoi Kinkoku, a literati painter ascetic practitioners, is, according to one of his seals on the Giter-Yelen landscape, the “Ink-Mad” Painter (Bokuchi 墨痴), whose landscape 10.8.2 4:01:35 PM 170｜ suggests a visceral and experiential view of the mountain perceived at the Notes periphery of normal cognition. One of Taiga’s seals on Lake Landscape 1 ) Many Gyokudō specialists believe that his surname should be pronounced describes him as “the horse judge Jiufang Gao in a former life” (Zenshin Sōma Hōkyūkō 前身相馬方九皐); it makes reference to the literati “Urakami,” but in order to be consistent with general usage in the catalogue his painter who can pierce through external appearances to understand the name will be spelled in the traditional manner, “Uragami,” in this essay. 2 ) This work has previously been published in: Suzuki Susumu, “Uragami Gyokudō hitsu Shun’un moko zu,” Kobijutsu 34 (1971): 103–5; Tanaka essence of the world, much like the famous judge of horses Jiufang Gao who served Duke Mu of Qin.18) And Jakuchū’s signature on Moon and Stephen Addiss et al., Myriad of Autumn Leaves: Japanese Art rom the Kurt and Plum reads “Old Man of the Rice Bushel” (Beito’ō 米斗翁), a sobriquet he Millie Giter Collection (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1983), no. adopted in his later years to indicate his willingness to paint for a bushel 57; and Lisa Rotondo-McCord, ed., An Enduring Vision: 17th- to 20th-Century of rice, as much a spiritual disposition as an economic necessity. The Japanese Painting from the Gitter-Yelen Collection (New Orleans: New Orleans ink paintings in the Giter-Yelen Collection, then, might be understood as a dramatis personae expressed primarily in monochrome. heir selfportraits may vary dramatically from scroll to scroll, but collectively they showcase the remarkable ability of ink painting to embody cultural axioms in Japan and East Asia. Ichimatsu, ed., Uragami Gyokudō gafu (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1979), no. 230; Museum of Art, 2002), pl. 25. 3 ) On the importance of the four-character (and occasionally ive-character) titles to the experience of Gyokudō’s landscapes see Kobayashi Tadashi, “Uragami Gyokudō no pafōmansu,” in Uragami Gyokudō, exh. cat. (Chiba and Okayama: Chiba-shi Bijutsukan and Okayama Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 2006), 249–56. 4 ) It was one of six seals that were preserved among descendants of his eldest son Shunkin, the Hayashibara family, and eventually donated to the Hayashibara Museum in 1993. These seals were the primary ones employed by Gyokudō CAPTIONS in his late years, and according to Moriyasu Osamu, are found on over seventy 1. Uragami Gyokudō, Spring Haze. Giter-Yelen Collection. percent of works in the artist’s oeuvre. See Moriyasu, “Uragami Gyokudō 2. Detail of Figure 1. sakuhin no hennen ni tsuite—inshō no shiyōrei kara no apurōchi,” Kajima 3. Alexander Cozens, from A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1786) bijutsu kenkyū 14 (1997): 91–107. 5 ) For a survey of textual accounts of Gyokudō and sake, see Kōno Motoaki, “Gyokudō to sake,” Gyokudō, Chikuden, Beisanjin, ed. Kōno Motoaki, vol. 2 of Edo meisaku gachō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinshindō, 1993), 148–55. For an introduction to Gyokudō’s life and art see Stephen Addiss, Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters: he Arts of Uragami Gyokudō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987). 6 ) For the full text see Han Lizhou, Wang Wugong wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), 181–2. For a discussion in English see Ding Xiang Warner, “Mr. Five Dippers of Drunkenville: The Representation of Enlightenment in Wang Ji’s Drinking Poems,” Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 118, No. 3 (July–Sept 1998): 347–55; and Warner, A Wild Deer Amid Soaring Phoenixes: The Opposition Poetics of Wang Ji (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 107–8. 7 ) Concerning Wang Ji’s “opposition poetics” see Stephen Owen, he Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 14–26. See also Warner, A Wild Deer. 8 ) This rhetoric of drunkenness was rooted in early Chinese literary models, but from the Tang period onward the drunken brush-wielder was a persona occasionally taken up by calligraphers and painters. For select episodes from this tradition see Peter C. Sturman, “Wine and Cursive: he Limits of Individualism in Northern Sung China,” in Cary Y. Liu et al., eds., Character and Context in Chinese Calligraphy (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999), 200–31, and Nishigami Minoru, “Hatsuboku kaki zu no tanjō—Jo’i to Min kōki no Sekkō bunjin gadan,” in Mindai kaiga to Sesshū, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Nezu regy|後付.indd 170 10.8.2 4:01:35 PM Returning Home: Edo Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection ｜171 Bijutsukan, 2005), 25–9. 9 ) Gyokudō’s curiously cautious and episodic manner of drinking-while-painting is captured in Tanomura Chikuden’s account of him in his “Prattlings of a Mountain Hermit” (Sanchūjin jōzetsu). See also the discussion in Satō Yasuhiro, “Muhō to iu koto—Uragami Gyokudō no hangikōshugi,” in Satō Yasuhiro, Uragami Gyokudō, vol. 14 of Shinchō Nihon bijutsu bunko (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), 73–85. 10 ) Satō, ibid. 11 ) Jonathan Hay makes this point in noting that if the self-fashioning of patrons through painting is taken into consideration, this tradition in China goes back to the fourth century. See Hay, “The Functions of Chinese Painting: Toward a Unified Field Theory,” in Anthropologies of Art, ed. Mariët Westermann (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2005), 111–23. 12 ) See Jean Claude Lebensztejn, L’art de la tache: Introduction à la Nouvelle méthode d’Alexander Cozens (Montélimar, France: Editions du Limon, 1990). Henri Lemaître cited “the Far East” as an inluence on Cozens’ bloting technique in Le paysage anglais à l’aquarelle, 1760–1851 (Paris: Bordas, 1955), 93–94. 13 ) On the Fenollosa/Dow concept of “Notan” see Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: a series of exercises in art structure for the use of students and teachers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., Inc., 1899). 14 ) The concept of “characterology” is borrowed from Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998). 15 ) his point is made in the introductory chapter of Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: he Social Art of Wen Zhengming , 1470–1559 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). 16 ) he formation of Zenga as a ield of collecting is discussed in Christine M.E. Guth, “Nanga and Zenga in America, 1956 to 1976,” in An Enduring Vision: 17th to 20th-Century Japanese Painting rom the Giter-Yelen Collection, ed. Lisa RotondoMcCord (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2002), 203–12; see also Yūji Yamashita, “Reconsidering ‘Zenga’—In terms of America, in terms of Japanese art history,” in ZENGA—he Return rom America: Zenga rom the GiterYelen Collection, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Asano Laboratories, Inc.), 19–28. 17 ) As Itō Shiori has recently observed, painters of these diferent ailiations were commonly designated as Chinese-style painters under the term “Tōga” in mid- to late Edo period painting texts. See “‘Tōga’ to shite no Itō Jakuchū,” in Itō Jakuchū—Anazā wārudo, exh. cat. (Chiba and Shizuoka: Chiba Shiritsu Bijutsukan and Shizuoka Kenritsu Bijutsukan, 2010), 236–45. 18 ) Jiufang Gao and the Chinese lore surrounding celebrated horse judges are discussed in Robert E. Harrist, Jr., “The Legacy of Bole: Physiognomy and Horses in Chinese Painting,” Artibus Asiae 57 1/2 (1997): 135–56. regy|後付.indd 171 10.8.2 4:01:35 PM