Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde

Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde
Author: Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004437061

Japanese calligraphy had its international heyday—collaborating with and yet challenging abstract painting—in the early postwar years. This book explores a Kyoto-based calligraphy group Bokujinkai, and its contribution to the Japanese, American, and European postwar avant-gardes.

Bokujinkai

Bokujinkai
Author: Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer
Publisher: Japanese Visual Culture
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789004424654

The Bokujinkai-or 'People of the Ink'-was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers, Morita Shiryu, Inoue Yuichi, Eguchi Sogen, Nakamura Bokushi, and Sekiya Yoshimichi. The avant-garde calligraphy movement they launched aspired to raise calligraphy to the same level of international prominence as abstract painting. To realize this vision, the Bokujinkai established creative collaborations with artists from European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism, and soon began sharing exhibition spaces with them in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond. By focusing on this exceptional moment in the history of Japanese calligraphy, I show how the Bokujinkai rerouted the trajectory of global abstract art and attuned foreign audiences to calligraphic visualities and narratives.

Parallel Modernism

Parallel Modernism
Author: Chinghsin Wu
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520299825

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan

The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan
Author: Ayelet Zohar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000477479

This volume examines the visual culture of Japan’s transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan’s transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. The book presents case studies of creative transformation demonstrating how new concepts and methods were perceived and altered to match views and theories prevalent in Meiji Japan, and by what means different practitioners negotiated between their existing skills and the knowledge generated from incoming ideas to create innovative modes of practice and representation that reflected the specificity of modern Japanese artistic circumstances. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Japanese studies, Asian studies, and Japanese history, as well as those who use approaches and methods related to globalization, cross-cultural studies, transcultural exchange, and interdisciplinary studies.

The Third Mind

The Third Mind
Author: William Seward Burroughs
Publisher: Calder Publications Limited
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1978
Genre: Creative writing
ISBN: 9780714538624

Art in the Encounter of Nations

Art in the Encounter of Nations
Author: Bert Winther-Tamaki
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780824824006

Art in the Encounter of Nations is the first book-length study of interactions between the Japanese and American art worlds in the early postwar years. It brings to light a rich exchange of opinions and debates regarding the relationship between the art of the two nations. The author begins with an examination of the Japanese margins of American Abstract Expressionism. Taking a contrapuntal approach, he investigates four abstract painters: two Japanese artists who moved to the United States (Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo) and two European Americans whose work is often associated with Japanese calligraphy (Mark Tobey and Franz Kline). He then looks at the work of two young scions of the calligraphy and pottery worlds of Japan -- Morita Shiryo and Yagi Kazuo -- and argues that their radical innovations in these ancient arts were, in part, provoked by their sense of a threat posed by Euro-American modernity. The final chapter is devoted to the career of Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both the U.S. and Japan in shifting ratios through a series of public and private places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions.

Japanese Art After 1945

Japanese Art After 1945
Author: Alexandra Munroe
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1996-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780810925939

The exhibition, 'Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, ' is an interpretive survey of the last fifty years of Japanese avant-garde art. It is a great pleasure for The Japan Foundation to be co-organizer of the American tour, which travels to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Heart of the Brush

Heart of the Brush
Author: Kazuaki Tanahashi
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1611801346

Its history, techniques, aesthetics, and philosophy—with an in-depth practical guide to understanding and drawing 150 characters A guide to the history and enjoyment of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy that offers the possibility of appreciating it in a hands-on way—with step-by-step instructions for brushing 150 classic characters. This book is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history and art of calligraphy as it's been practiced for centuries in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia. It works as a guide for the beginner hoping to develop an appreciation for Asian calligraphy, for the person who wants to give calligraphy-creation a try, as well as for the expert or afficionado who just wants to browse through and exult in lovely examples. It covers the history and development of the art, then the author invites the reader to give it a try. The heart of the book, called "Master Samples and Study," presents 150 characters--from "action" to "zen"--each in a two-page spread. On each verso page the character is presented in three different styles, each one chosen for its beauty and identified by artist when possible. The character's meaning, pronunciation (in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese), etymology, the pictograph from which it evolved, and other notes of interest are included. At the bottom of the page the stroke order is shown: the sequence of brush movements, numbered in their traditional order. On each facing recto page is Kaz's own interpretation of the character, full page.

Brushed in Light

Brushed in Light
Author: Abé Markus Nornes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472902431

Drawing on a millennia of calligraphy theory and history, Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC cinemas. This includes silent era intertitles, subtitles, title frames, letters, graffiti, end titles, and props. Markus Nornes also looks at the role of calligraphy in film culture at large, from gifts to correspondence to advertising. The book begins with a historical dimension, tracking how calligraphy is initially used in early cinema and how it is continually rearticulated by transforming conventions and the integration of new technologies. These chapters ask how calligraphy creates new meaning in cinema and demonstrate how calligraphy, cinematography, and acting work together in a single film. The last part of the book moves to other regions of theory. Nornes explores the cinematization of the handwritten word and explores how calligraphers understand their own work.