初見　石川九楊

What meaning stirs in the act of giving form to words?

What possibilities lie within the creation through paper, brush, and ink? 

How does the world of calligraphy unfold and expand?

 

—From among the works created in pursuit of these questions, I present a selection of “first encounters” at Shibunkaku, Ginza 5-chome, Tokyo.

 

Ishikawa Kyuyoh

This work was created for the cover design of Tanigawa Gan's collection of essays, The Form of Nothingness, which was privately published by an enthusiastic editor. By creating collages from Tanigawa Gan's poems and prose, and by using auxiliary lines and filling in the work on gray-dyed paper, I attempted to come as close as possible to Tanigawa Gan's expressive philosophy.

I attempted to depict a landscape of “fatigue” using thoroughly weakened brushstrokes and a structure of wide, spaced strokes. I wrote the part about “quietly hopeless kindness” and then painted it out with sumi ink. A sense of completion is inappropriate for this haiku/phrase; instead, I wanted an unfinished landscape.

In what might better be called “automatic writing,” I filled the page with words (kanji words) that came into my mind one after another, the brushstrokes unplanned in a composition left to chance. By smearing the surrounding area with sumi ink, the scribbles of miscellaneous words that appeared between the conscious and preconscious mind took shape as a complete vocabulary.

The earlier stroke of ink, which has occupied its space first, leaves no place for the following stroke. Consequently, following strokes are hidden behind the preceding strokes. By using this three-dimensional calligraphy technique, I tried to express the meaning of “rejecting” the empty trends and idle chatter of the times.

The great way has no gate—since there is no gate, it is difficult to enter the great way, yet because there is no specific predetermined gate there may be gates everywhere and one may enter from anywhere. Even a great road is not necessarily straight, it might be narrow and like a maze, or it might be a winding way.

 

The work on the right shows this polysemous four-character phrase in a straight-on, near-symmetrical form, while the work on the left is written focusing on its irregularities. With its complex meaning, I explored this phrase through a variety of approaches, discarding some along the way.

Although this work is titled The Tale of Genji II, the II series—on kiku-ban paper cut in half (47 x 61 cm)—was actually written first. While each of the fifty-five chapters of the The Tale of Genji is independent, they also play out seamlessly.

The same is true of the calligraphy. The horizontal, vertical, and broken-line waves developed one after another through the previous chapter are combined with twists and turns of layered brushstrokes, digging down, revealing and weaving together the world of the “Early Ferns” chapter, in which “Naka no Kimi is welcomed by Niou no Miya, and Kaoru meets her when the blossoms are at their best.”