水墨画の魅力 1：中国からどう伝わったのかThe Allure of Sumi-e, Part 1: How Did It Arrive from China?

Ink painting is one of the Japanese arts that travelers are keenly interested in. Yet it is not widely known that the history of ink painting in Japan began through a curious twist of fate. Over several installments, I will describe the background.

Needless to say, the roots of Japanese ink painting lie in Chinese art. However, ink painting did not suddenly appear in China out of nowhere; it was based on the historical and technical practice of calligraphy. Calligraphy had long been developed for practical purposes, but it began to be applied as an art form starting in the mid-period of the Later Han dynasty (25–220).

Building upon the foundation of calligraphy as an art, the intellectuals of the time then turned their attention to painting, which had previously been held in low regard. Thus began a new era in which cultured individuals practiced both calligraphy and painting, leading to the development of distinct painting techniques.

What arose there was hakubyo (白描), the white-line drawing. After the fall of the Han, in the Jin (265–420) and then the Liu Song (420–479), many white-line drawings were made, and the form reached maturity in the Tang (618–907), the age when civilization bloomed. Japan at the time was deeply influenced by this Tang.

In the capital, Chang'an, the cultures of north and south China were blending while culture also flowed in from India and Iran, and it developed by absorbing a complex and varied culture.

In the process, as a reaction, a consciousness of Chinese culture revived. Then, interestingly, the awareness of the "line" cultivated historically in calligraphy rose, and a rejection of the excessive "color" of foreign culture followed. The intellectuals, who denied color and aimed to unite calligraphy and painting as they had long been cultivated, raised the white-line drawing, free of color, to its highest level.

At around the same time, the An Lushan Rebellion (755–757) broke out, an energy arose that denied rule by the aristocracy, and ink painting appeared, which was not the aristocratic white-line drawing. To simplify, white-line drawing is marked by a strong awareness of "line" and ink painting of "surface," but ink painting too, receiving the current of rejecting foreign culture, moved step by step toward painting in ink alone, without color.

It becomes relatively clear if we see it through the relations of "brush" and "line" on one side and "ink" and "surface" (color) on the other.

But the problem of painting argued in China through the relation of "brush" and "ink" basically takes the side that values the brush. In Bifa Ji (Notes on Brushwork) by Jing Hao of the Tang (ca. 850–ca. 911), for example, it is written that the brush expresses the mass and vitality of form, and the ink expresses the solidity of yin and yang, of hollow and swell.

Against this subject-like culture that puts the "brush" on the axis in China, a predicate-like culture that values "ink" suited Japan better, and that too became an important factor in the development of Japanese ink painting. Behind it lay the influence of Zen in later ages.

What mattered above all in ink painting was a technique called haboku (破墨), "broken ink." The older, subject-like understanding of the brush had the brush draw the outline of the form and the ink give it flesh. Japan inverted this, and so made predicate-like expression possible.

Further, a technique without outline, called hatsuboku (溌墨), "splashed ink," was produced in China, and with it a search began for ways to temper the tendency to value the brush that draws the outline. But this was only a retrospective struggle to find a predicate-like standpoint from a Chinese, subject-like point of view, and not a purely predicate-like expression. It was the ink painters of Japan who honed this.

The key lies not in the difference of technique but in seeing the difference of linguistic structure.

Still, hatsuboku too rested on a dual thinking, moving from "brush as master, ink as servant" (筆主墨従) to "ink as master, brush as servant" (墨主筆従), so even at this stage there was no room for Japan to receive ink painting.

At this time attention turned again to Hua Shanshui Xu (Preface to Painting Landscapes), written long before by Zong Bing (375–443). It was the first thought to apply landscape philosophy to a theory of painting, and under its influence landscape painting in ink arose in China. The style was established around the mid-tenth century, about the time the Northern Song was founded.

In this current the movement toward uniting inner and outer, and fusing subject and object, grew strong. Landscape painting developed on that ground, so here too it did not match the predicate-like structure of the Japanese language. Also, very few landscape paintings came from China to Japan then, and the chance to see the few that did arrive was limited to some aristocrats. That lasted in Japan until around the fourteenth century.

Ink painting, which made its own development in China, thus did not for a long time strongly influence Japan. But by good fortune a line of ink painting that China's aristocratic society did not value, judging it worthless, found its chance to flow into Japan.

The one who made those works was Muqi (known in Japan as Mokkei; 1210?–1270?), a Zen monk of the late thirteenth century.

Continued in Part 2.