Bokujinkai

Bokujinkai (墨人会, 'People of the Ink') is a Japanese calligraphy collective founded on January 5, 1952 at Ryōanji in Kyoto by Shiryū Morita, Yūichi Inoue, Sōgen Eguchi, Yoshimichi Sekiya and Bokushi Nakamura, all students of the experimental calligrapher Sōkyū Ueda. Its manifesto declared calligraphy 'impoverished' by its isolation from modern art and called for opening it to the world. Through the journal Bokubi, sent to galleries in New York and Paris, the group built a dialogue with painters such as Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages, and showed at MoMA, Documenta and the São Paulo Biennial. Their large few-character works - fat, splashing brushstrokes where bodily gesture outweighs legibility - helped define avant-garde calligraphy (zen'ei sho).

Defining characteristics

• Large-scale shōjisūsho: compositions of just a few characters
• Fat, expressive brushstrokes emphasizing the spread, drip and splatter of ink
• The calligrapher's bodily gesture foregrounded over legibility
• Deliberate overlap with abstract painting, at times abandoning written characters entirely
• Experiments with nontraditional tools and materials: brooms, enamel, lacquer, metallic paint
• Retention of moji-sei (the written character) as what separates calligraphy from painting

Key figures

• Shiryū Morita (1912-1998) — Co-founder, theorist and editor of the journals Bokubi and Bokujin
• Yūichi Inoue (1916-1985) — Co-founder whose radical character-less works pushed calligraphy toward painting

Example works

• Work No. 1 — Yūichi Inoue (1955)
• Ryū wa ryū o shiru (Dragon Knows Dragon) — Shiryū Morita (1969)

Sources

• Bokujinkai - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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