Bokujinkai : : Japanese calligraphy and the postwar avant-garde / / Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer.

• Superior document: Japanese Visual Culture ; 19
• VerfasserIn: Bogdanova-Kummer, Eugenia,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, 2020.
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Japanese Visual Culture ; 19.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.
• Notes: Includes index.

The Bokujinkai-or 'People of the Ink'-was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers: Morita Shiryū, Inoue Yūichi, Eguchi Sōgen, Nakamura Bokushi, and Sekiya Yoshimichi. The avant-garde movement they launched aspired to raise calligraphy to the same level of international prominence as abstract painting. To this end, the Bokujinkai collaborated with artists from European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism, sharing exhibition spaces with them in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond. The first English-language book to focus on the postwar history of Japanese calligraphy, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde explains how the Bokujinkai rerouted the trajectory of global abstract art and attuned foreign audiences to calligraphic visualities and narratives.

Table of Contents

Postwar Japan and calligraphy -- From Keiseikai to Bokujinkai : calligraphy's avant-garde in the 1950s -- Morita's rainbow : line and space between calligraphy and abstract painting -- Primitivism as conceptal common past -- Zen metaphysics, calligraphy, and abstraction -- From rainbow to confetti : the 1960s and beyond.