Page 322 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

were particularly those used often in Zen vege-
tarian meals —large radish (daikon), eggplant,
melons, grapes, and chestnuts. Fish or crusta-
ceans rarely appear, and then only as adjuncts to
a Zen parable such as Josetsu's famous Catfish
and Gourd, or as staffage in close-up water-
scapes. Rarely, hanging-scroll triptychs whose
central image was a figure employed kachoga
for the flanking scrolls; examples are the very
early Sakyamuni and Plum Blossoms with
inscription by the Zen abbot Hakuun Egyo in
the Rikkyoku-an of Tofuku-ji in Kyoto, and the
Byaku-e Kannon, Bamboo, and Plum in the
Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

THE "NEW MANNER" IN PAINTING
Few monochrome ink landscapes are known
before the fifteenth century. Ink alone had been
used with increasing frequency from the late
twelfth century for "sketched" iconographic
models, including whole manuals of such
sketches in handscroll format. As the tidal wave
of Chan (J: Zen) Buddhist influence began to
reach Japan from China in the thirteenth cen-
tury, some ink copies or variations of the prin-
cipal Zen subjects were produced, notably at
K6zan-ji in northern Kyoto. By the fourteenth
century such ink monochrome subjects were
more common, and for the first time Chinese
landscape subjects, such as the Eight Views of
the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a subject that had
been taken up by Chan painters, were being
painted in Japan by Japanese artists. The earliest
extant Japanese rendition of the Xiao and Xiang
theme was painted by Shitan (d. 1317). Land-
scapes by Gukei Yue (act. c. 1360-1375) and
Ka'6 (act. before 1345) followed; nevertheless
1413 (approximately) was a watershed year,
quantitatively and qualitatively, in the produc-
tion of Japanese ink monochrome landscape.

Zen monk-painters
The key monument at the base of the grand
structure of Muromachi period (1333-1573) ink
painting (suiboku-ga) is the famous Catfish and
Gourd (c. 1413) by Josetsu, an illustration, in a fig. 4. Josetsu (act. c. 1400). Catching a Catfish with a Gourd. Japanese. Hanging scroll; ink and slight
landscape setting, of a Zen koan, or parable: color on paper. Taizo-in, Myoshin-ji, Kyoto

Poised! With the gourd
He tries to pin that slippery fish.
Some oil on the gourd on the front and poems on the back. It was ture is most unusual. It is much wider than
Would add zest to the chase. commissioned, according to attached texts, by high, basically a horizontal expanse with the
the
shogun, almost certainly Yoshimochi (r.
(Shusu [d. 1423], trans. Matsushita 1974) principal, darkest, and sharpest motifs in the
1394-1423), from the monk-painter Josetsu of foreground —a near-caricature of a man holding
The picture, now a hanging scroll with texts of Shokoku-ji, one of the five major Zen temples a gourd, a realistic catfish in the stream, a
thirty-one poems and comments above, was of Kyoto (the Gozan, or Five Mountains) and a clump of bamboo, and around the bend in the
originally a small dais screen with the picture favorite establishment of Yoshimochi. The pic- stream at the left, some small but heavily inked

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