Ishikawa Kyuyoh is rightly well known as a calligrapher, but he is also a scholar of unparalleled stature in his explication of calligraphy from ancient classics to the work of today. His attainment is far too vast for me to dare endeavor a comprehensive overview. I will seek instead to offer some insight into Kyuyoh's work from the perspective of the relationship between his calligraphy and painting.
An ideology of long standing in Oriental art holds that calligraphy and painting are of a singular art form. That ideology lies beyond my scope of expertise, but I understand its basic thrust as follows: that calligraphy and painting share a common origin and that the rudiments of brushwork in both are identical. Leaving the technical details of brushwork aside, let me acknowledge resistance to the notion of a common origin.
The beginnings of calligraphy and painting lie hidden in the mists of distant history, so a definitive rebuttal of the common-origin theory is well-nigh impossible. I find that theory difficult, however, to swallow. My difficulty centers on an unwillingness to accept that drawing pictures came first and that writing script emerged later as a divergence from pictures. I believe, on the contrary, that the origin of pictures postdates that of script-that pictures arose as a result of, or even as something occasioned directly by, the birth of script.
My argument invites an obvious objection: Such peoples as the aboriginal people of Australia drew pictures before they possessed written script. I, for one, have the highest regard for the aesthetic value of aboriginal art, but I am alert to the conceit implicit in that assessment from the perspective of an industrialized nation. The existence of cultures not possessed of written scripts, including those that existed before written scripts arose anywhere, is undeniable. But to portray any such culture as devoid of the potential for calligraphy or pictures is untenable.
Common-origin claims for calligraphy and pictures, which deny that pictures follow script chronologically, evoke the worst of historicism. They posit a stage prior to the divergence of pictures and script, albeit in a positive manner, and they betray a historical perspective that trivializes the significance of cultural existence prior to the advent of written script.
We could, for the sake of argument, interpret such a stage as a marvelously harmonious admixture of elements of script and elements of pictures, but we would still be adhering to a stance of claiming a historical perspective. Surely we can do better than that. Surely we would better come to terms with the calligraphy-picture relationship forthrightly, without resorting to such trivialization as common-origin and prior-to-divergence assumptions.
I describe Kyuyoh's artistic positioning below in reference to the stance articulated in the foregoing remarks. My description consists of an interplay of my understanding of some of Kyuyoh's works and the artist's commentary on those works.
Let us begin our examination of Ishikawa Kyuyoh's work with an inquiry into the relationship between calligraphy and pictures. Deploying the term "relationship" here might seem incongruous. Calligraphy's predication on the presence of script is self-evident. That predication is untethered, however, to the property of readability. The single-character works of the calligrapher Morita Shiryu (1912-1998) come to mind. Those works are not necessarily readable as text, but their evocation of script is unmistakable.
Kyuyoh's work, too, is generally unreadable as text but nonetheless evocative of script. He brings to his calligraphy, meanwhile, a theory of script that is singularly radical. His work reveals to us the secret reality that text is but an empty trace of the act of writing.
"We denizens of the kanji culture of northeast Asia are blinded by the framework of script," writes Kyuyoh in Hisshoku no kozo: kaku koto no genshogaku (The structure of taction: A phenomenological examination of writing) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1992). "We regard words," he explains, "as essentially equivalent to script. That allows the hierarchical relationship [between words and script] to become inverted, and we end up misinterpreting script as equivalent to words. We lose sight of the distinction between script and words, and they become commingled, which engenders confusion."
"The brushwork art known as calligraphy has retained a commanding presence in northeast Asia," Kyuyoh observes elsewhere in Hisshoku no kozo. "Some might interpret that in the global context of thought as meaning that northeast Asia's written languages harbor a malaise. We can well imagine that interpretation emanating from the alphabet cultures of the West... We need to declare good riddance to the fictional framework of words and develop a cognitive grasp of the act of writing. Simply grasping at words yields nothing more than misguided thinking. Developing a sound grasp of writing, however, opens our eyes assuredly to a wealth of possibility."
Suggesting that we need to turn away from the fictional framework of script and focus instead on the act of writing might sound like deconstructionist posturing. Kyuyoh is calling attention here, however, to the concrete reality of taction-to the drama that unfolds as the tip of a brush encounters paper, as friction arises when the brush moves across the paper, and as the brush withdraws from the paper. When we give ourselves over to that drama do we experience the bracing realization noted elsewhere: that the text visible on the paper is but an empty trace of the act of writing.
I will discuss how Kyuyoh's stance plays out in individual works, but let me precede that discussion with some commentary from Kyuyoh. That commentary is in regard to copies that he made of classic works of Chinese calligraphy in 1968 as grounding for his work to be. It is from his Kindai shoshi (A history of modern calligraphy) (Nagoya: University of Nagoya Press, 2009).
"What began," writes Kyuyoh, "as copying through up close engagement assumed, in Japan's modern era, the spirit of sketching from a distance." That resulted in what he characterizes as "personalized exaggerations of the distinguishing characteristics of the classic works reproduced." He attributes that outcome to "the curious assertions of subjective reproduction." And he laments that it "yields only self-affirmation and a historical blank; that is, the mindless reproduction of mythic style."
Of note here is how Kyuyoh perceives "subjective reproduction" in the copying of classics by Japanese calligraphers since Hidai Tenrai (1872-1939) and how he characterizes their approach as "mythic style."Kyuyoh is notably detailed in his account of the copying of classics by the Hidai disciple Tejima Yukei (1901-1987). "We witness exaggerations of the distinguishing characteristics of the originals, but the particulate rhythm of the writing, the taction and the style, differ not a whit from the style of Tejima. Whatever he writes converges into the same basic style."
Kyuyoh's pejorative employment of the adjective "mythic" calls to mind the "mythic violence" of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The latter sobriquet appears in Benjamin's essay "Zur kritik der gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"), originally published in the Tübingen-based journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive for social science and social policy) in 1921.
Benjamin associates mythic violence with lawmaking violence exercised by those in power. He contrasts mythic violence with divine violence, which he associates with lawbreaking violence. His definition of divine violence is somewhat obscure, but it unquestionably refers to a direct sort of violence aimed at liberation from mythic violence.
Kyuyoh criticizes the reproductions by Tejima and by other calligraphers of similar orientation for approaching their subject matter only through preexisting verbal frameworks and through mythic style. That approach to reproduction clearly corresponds to Benjamin's "lawmaking."
"I sought [in my reproduction]," writes Kyuyoh in Kindai shoshi, "to demolish the infiltrative styles and frameworks of the past. My object was to grasp and recreate the material by scrutinizing it unrelentingly through unconstrained vision and through whole-body awareness and perception."
Kyuyoh's methodology is difficult to categorize, to be sure, as divine violence, but the deployment in contraposition to mythic styles is unmistakable. He paradoxically equates the sketching that he undertook by way of reproduction as both demolishing and recreating styles of the past (mythic styles). We perceive in that act, meanwhile, a foretaste of the calligraphy that he would later create.
Also striking in Kyuyoh's account of his methodology is a resonance with The Analects of Kongzi (Confucius, around 551-around 479 BCE). I note here a famous passage from the "Wei Zheng" ("Practice of Governance") chapter of that work: "Review the old and know the new." This passage centers on the kanji 温, which ordinarily means "warm" and which, in the roundabout manner summarized here, can also mean "old."
We in Japan have customarily interpreted the phrasing as meaning to inquire of, study, or investigate the old. Our great explicator of kanji, Shirakawa Shizuka (1910-2006), offers, however, a different interpretation.
The 皿 component, by itself, is the kanji for dish, and the three dots, 氵, on the left side of 温 are a component used to impart the meaning of water or fluidity to kanji. The component 日 that appears above 皿 in 温 is, according to Shirakawa, a permutation of the kanji for meat, 肉. Shirakawa thus interprets the kanji 温 as meaning to place meat in a dish and add water and heat.
If we accept Shirakawa's interpretation, we should perhaps read the passage in question from The Analects as "Warm the old and know the new." I would go so far as to interpret Kongzi as saying that the past remains in the realm of the possible and that the new is rebirth that occurs when we warm the old. We can regard Kyuyoh's reproduction, too, as a matter not of simply absorbing the style of calligraphic classics but, rather, of vicariously reliving the classics' creative dynamics as something new.
We move on now to the promised examination of individual works by Kyuyoh. Each of the works that we will examine occupies an important position in his oeuvre, but the selection criteria reflect my focus here on the relationship between calligraphy and painting. I thank the reader, too, for understanding that I have disregarded chronological order in prioritizing that focus.
The first three works that we will examine are renderings of texts by Tamura Ryuichi (1923-1998), a poet of Japan's Arechi group (named after the epic work by the poet T. S. Eliot [1888-1965], The Wasteland). All three are from a work by Tamura, "Vertical Coffin," that he published as part of a poetry collection in 1956.
Tamura's poem begins with the following lines:
Don't touch my corpse
Your hands
cannot finger death
Those and the poem's subsequent lines fairly shimmer with declarative tension. Sublime and thoughtful, "Vertical Coffin" is a standout work of Japan's postwar poetry. It was my first encounter with the world of contemporary poetry, and I suspect that Kyuyo experienced a similar encounter at some point.
Full disclosure: I later became friends with Tamura, and we remained close until his final years, which entailed struggling to keep up with him through epic drinkfests. So I had extra motivation to include Kyuyoh's "Vertical Coffin" works in this survey.
One of Kyuyoh's "Vertical Coffin" works, Hang (1970), is a rendering of a single kanji for that word, 吊. It is highly evocative of the poem, coming from the following passage:
Take my corpse,
hang it in the midst of civilization
and let it rot
Kyuyoh describes the creation of Hang in Jisen jichu: Ishikawa Kyuyoh sakuhinshu (Selected by the artist, annotated by the artist: Works of Ishikawa Kyuyoh) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2006). He reports that he wanted to depict existence in the state of dangling. The work began, he explains, with dyeing white paper gray with sumi ink and then drawing a square matrix of horizontal and vertical lines to underlie the kanji.
"I had been forever unable," writes Kyuyoh, "to transcend the [preconception denoted by the words] 'the atmosphere of a work of calligraphy.' But when I added the matrix, those words changed instantly into vocabulary of my milieu."
We nod in acknowledgment of Kyuyoh's account on viewing Hang. The matrix was new to calligraphy. Kyuyoh's adoption of the matrix marked formally a turning point in his work. The kanji is sufficiently darker than the underlying matrix, however, for the work to retain the function of rendering script.
About a quarter century after creating Hang, Kyuyoh created another "Vertical Coffin" work, Tamura Ryuichi, Vertical Coffin (II-1) (1996). That work incorporates a horizontal variation on parallel-line effects that Kyuyoh had employed in other works. He also deployed parallel-line effects, as we will see, in his renderings of texts from the Japanese Buddhist text of the 13th century Tannisho (Lamentations on divergences) and the 11th-century masterwork of Japanese literature The Tale of Genji.
Tamura Ryuichi, Vertical Coffin (II-1) centers on a tall, narrow triangle topped by a cuplike shape. Kyuyoh has rendered, albeit almost unreadably, the entire text of "Vertical Coffin" on the left half of the triangle. A dense but porous array of parallel lines shimmers horizontally rightward from the characters of the text, and a tangled mesh of shapes suggestive of script unfolds from the right half of the triangle into the right margin.
Calligraphy is not an instrument for elucidating the meaning of poetry. New perspectives on the poem emerge, however, from the interplay of the poem's imagery and Kyuyoh's mysteriously architectural rendering. That interplay is especially striking in the passages
Don't lay my corpse on the ground
and
Place my corpse
inside a coffin
and stand it upright
Kyuyoh's Tamura Ryuichi, Vertical Coffin (II-8), also from 1996, offers a variation on the vertical parallel lines that appear in his Tale of Genji series. The lines run up and down across the entire field, and subtle, inevitable distortions engender derivative effects in what strikes the viewer as automatic drawing. Kyuyoh has staggered the tops of text columns in the upper right corner, and we might sense in that a self-critical effort to avoid yielding the calligraphy to systematic process.
The shapes on view evoke eros in Kyuyoh's rendering of text from the "Miotsukushi" ("Channel Markers") chapter in his Tale of Genji II series (1992). "I sought to render each stroke in each character as a single line," writes Kyuyoh in Jisen jichu: Ishikawa Kyuyoh sakuhinshu. "Conversely, I sometimes rendered a word as a single line." I dare mention here the undulating lines that radiate out from the upper right corner like black hair and the dangerous absurdity they pose of conflating writing with drawing.
Each of the five works in Kyuyoh's Li He Poems, Five Satirical Poems (1992) is of daunting size, at 360 cm high by 192 cm wide. Four of the works retain a narrow margin around a field covered with pitch-black brushstrokes that broaden into extreme blurring. The fifth work presents a basically monochrome field on which the renderings of text are utterly unreadable. Animating Kyuyoh's blurring is the happenstance that is bound to occur when the human element is in play, and we can well regard that happenstance as what occurs with kiln effects in pottery.
Implicit in the "kiln effects" observable in the expressive device of calligraphic blurring is latent taction. I take heart in how the calligrapher could cover the entire field of a work with pitch-black. Kyuyoh, however, is dismissive of the aesthetic of reliance on happenstance, which he characterizes as "Asian woe" in Ishikawa Kyuyoh jiden zuroku: waga sho wo kataru (Ishikawa Kyuyoh's autobiographical record: Relating my calligraphy) (Tokyo: Sayusha, 2019).
Whatever the merits or demerits of calligraphic kiln effects, Kyuyoh went no further with the sort of blurring seen in his Li He Poems, Five Satirical Poems. He reverted, instead, to straightforward taction, which would seem to have been a natural choice.
Kyuyoh focused from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s on producing calligraphic renderings of Japanese literary classics. In addition to The Tale of Genji, he tackled such works as the aforementioned 13th-century Buddhist text Tannisho, the extended essay Hojoki (Life around my hut), and the 14th-century essay collection Tsurezuregusa (Random thoughts).
Of special note are the 20-some works that Kyuyoh created as renderings of text from Tannisho. An anonymous author compiled Tannisho as a collection of conversations with Shinran (1173-1263), the founder of Japan's Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism. Striking in Shinran's religious stance is the counterintuitive assertion, "Even the virtuous can attain rebirth in the Pure Land. All the more easily the wicked." The notion of salvation is fundamental to the Jodo Shinshu teachings. The buddha Amitabha created the Pure Land (Jodo in Japanese), according to the teachings, by fulfilling 48 vows, which included provisions for all sentient beings to attain rebirth in the Pure Land. Shinran, as seen in the foregoing counterintuitive assertion, emphasized that the wicked were the primary target of salvation.
Kyuyoh endeavored repeatedly to render the full text of all 18 chapters of Tannisho calligraphically. Not until 1988, however, did he fulfill his quest, in a work titled Tannisho No. 18. That work, at 92.0 cm high by 56.5 cm wide, is of a substantive, though not spectacular, scale.
Filling the field almost completely are diverse images. Most prominent are horizontal and vertical lines of different lengths accompanied by diagonal lines, whorls, and somewhat readable characters of script. The narrowness of the lines is suggestive of pen work, but Kyuyoh has, in fact, rendered them with a brush. Thickened spindle-like shapes and dots and arcs appear haphazardly across the field. They contrast with the finer, stiff-brush lines of the work, engendering a hybrid rhythm.
Kyuyoh rendered the initial works of his Tannisho series on Chinese huajianzhi paper. That paper absorbs the sumi ink well, but it is prone to blurring and to scratchy fading. Determined to avoid those effects, Kyuyoh switched midway in his Tannisho series to Japanese gampi paper. That paper prevents blurry spreading and scratchy fading and thereby retains the look of the sumi ink exactly as it has been applied by the wielder of the brush. An expressive device that appears in the later Tannisho works is the severing of strokes after they have been applied, and Kyuyoh says that switching to gampi paper is what made that possible.
The techniques that Kyuyoh invented and refined in his renderings of Japanese literary classics and Tannisho are all on display in Tannisho No. 18. That work, as noted, is a rendering of the entire text of Tannisho. It redoubles my curiosity, however, as to why Kyuyoh was so determined to assemble the entire text in a single work and to accomplish that task despite repeated setbacks. What follows here is my personal interpretation of Kyuyoh's motivation and methodology, and I thank the reader for understanding that my interpretation might differ from that of the artist.
Kyuyoh followed Tannisho No. 18 with the 1988 work Tannisho No. 19. The latter work, like its predecessor, features linear interplay in the bottommost stratum that is visible through the overlaying strata. Kyuyoh characterizes it in Jisen jichu: Ishikawa Kyuyoh sakuhinshu as "a work that takes transverse calligraphy to the extreme." Tannisho No. 19, in contrast with the multiplicity of its predecessor, features an array of horizontal parallel lines that dominate the field.
I alluded to a possibly self-critical effort to avoid yielding the calligraphy to systematic process in Kyuyoh's Tamura Ryuichi, Vertical Coffin (II-8). We can regard the calligraphic process as a system that accepts or even gives play to distortions and differentials that arise unavoidably. To regard that action as an expressive device is to regard those distortions and differentials as the stuff of expression.
The art critic Minemura Toshiaki (1936-) characterizes the minimalist and conceptualist systems of repetitions, which spawned differentials almost unavoidably, as "lived systems." We recognize that phenomenon in Kyuyoh's Tannisho No. 19 and in his Tannisho No. 18, too. That is because Kyuyoh has deployed hybrid aggregations of images from top to bottom, from right to left in the order of parallel lines or lines of text.
The works in question arose not, writes Kyuyoh in Jisen jichu: Ishikawa Kyuyoh sakuhinshu, through conceptualizing but "through the cumulative experience of [calligraphic] production. My calligraphic history, that is, yielded works that I never would have envisaged conceptually."
What Kyuyoh is describing is, to my thinking, the totality in which calligraphy resides. The taction of the here and now resonates with sometime not now, with someplace not here. That is something Yoshimasu Gozo (1939-), a poet who intrigues Kyuyoh with his calligraphy as well as with his verse, would call centrifugal harmony. Whether Kyuyoh's Tannisho No. 18 and its payload of Tannisho's entire text resonates with Shinran's thought is, to be honest, beyond my ken. Readily evident, however, is that the calligrapher has mobilized the entirety of his capabilities to bring this work about.
I conclude with a discussion of a work that marked Kyuyoh's debut in earnest as a calligrapher: My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? (1972). The title comprises what, according to the New Testament books Mathew and Mark, were Jesus Christ's final words on the cross. They would have possessed a gripping sense of contemporary reality for Kyuyoh when he created the work in 1972. Japan's rapid economic growth of the postwar years was still under way, but antigovernment protests inspired by the Paris riots of 1968 had come to naught, and a large swath of Japanese youth had succumbed to angst.
My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? is a large work, at 2.7 meters high and 3.4 meters wide. Kyuyoh was working a day job at the time and relates that he worked through the night on the work several nights on end.
Calligraphy once served as a tool of lawmaking, of mythic violence. Contrasting with that mode of violence is, as we have seen, the creative destruction of divine violence and its turbulence. Residing somewhere even in that vortex is an energy that imparts an intellectual tension.
Scattered seemingly at random across My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? are several short phrases. The words of the title appear as the Japanese phonetic rendering of the Hebrew/Aramaic Eli eli lama sabachthani. Among the other phrases are the Japanese equivalents of "We have no work." "Do you believe in the violence of words?" "Words of the Bible." "All is ended." And "Fervent hope." The phrases overlap, and accompanying them are such devices as matrices, frames, and guidelines.
Kyuyoh sought in My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? to purge the calligraphy of the expressive beauty associated with a soft brush. He describes that effort in Ishikawa Kyuyoh jiden zuroku: waga sho wo kataru.
I rubbed the ferrule of the brush against the paper in applying the sumi ink. The touch is stiff and direct, as with a pencil or pen... That's hard, of course, on the brush, and applying the ink directly with the force of the hand is ordinarily taboo in calligraphy. I broke another rule in some places by redrawing strokes once and even twice.
Thus do we receive confirmation from the artist that this work became, as we suspected, a platform for new discoveries in taction. And he has more to say about My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
The project is still with me in real time, including the feeling that came over me when I completed the work. I knew then that calligraphy retained a wealth of untapped value for me to unearth... I came away from that experience with the visceral understanding that I would create calligraphy for the rest of my life.
Kyuyoh has given us the opportunity to absorb the compelling tale of the birth of an important calligrapher. By framing the essence of calligraphy as the drama of taction, Kyuyoh has done away with the hackneyed tone of traditional calligraphy and has blazed new possibilities for the art form that are both subtle and robust. I pay my deepest respect anew to the one-of-a-kind calligrapher Ishikawa Kyuyoh.