Using his self-made broom brush, Inoue Yuichi vigorously wrote a single character, “hin” (literally, “poverty”), on a large sheet of Japanese paper. Occupying the entire space, the character appears to be a human figure wearing a straw rain-cape and a sedge-hat, turning his back on the viewer, and ready to walk forward.

The scale of the paper, the spatial proportion and the visual expression of the character of the present work were rather daring and unconventional. Single character calligraphic works, known as ichijisho such as this piece, are recognized as Yuichi’s signature works today. Indeed, despite the artist’s ceaseless challenges over different possibilities of the characters throughout his artistic career—the formless, abstract expressionistic manner of calligraphy between 1955 and 1956, to give an example—it is the single-character works that account for the major part of Yuichi’s oeuvre. Until his death in 1985, Yuichi had notably approached this distinctive form of calligraphy in various ways at different phases of his career and life. Among these, several characters, including “hin”, are recurrent subjects to Yuichi, reflecting his artistic explorations as well as his life experience from the early years through to the late stage of his life.

The character “hin” is of particular significance to Yuichi, both in terms of its literary and semiotic meanings and physical structure. There are sixty-four single-character works of “hin” and some other works of “hin”-related phrases and idioms, such as “Shuhin” (Let us never forget our naked state of birth) and “Seihin” (honest poverty) known to have survived today. In the 1982 work Yuige (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto), the poem written near the time of his own death, Yuichi started with the line “Hin o mamori fude o furu’u” (keeping the naked state of birth, I wield my brush), stressing his ideal of practicing calligraphy without yearning for any worldly desire.

Visual structure of Yuichi’s hin series after 1972 witnesses to a personification tendency. This is clearly demonstrated in the movements of the last two strokes at the bottom, which stretch to both sides and resemble to the movements of human legs. This feature is observed by many, including Yoshihara Jiro. Taking its symbolic meaning into consideration, this personifed character “hin” represents Yuichi’s ideal of an artist and a human being, and thus can be viewed as the artist’s self-portrait, an image Yuichi strived for throughout his life.


Inoue Yuichi (calligrapher; 1916−1985)
Born in Tokyo. Studied calligraphy under Ueda Sokyu. Co-founded the avant-garde calligraphers group Bokujin-kai (Ink Human Society). His large scale, experimental calligraphy works of single Chinese characters responded to the concurrent international Abstract Expressionism, and breathed new life into the calligraphy world. Regarded as daring and innovative, his works were widely exhibited in Japan and abroad, including the Documenta in Kassel and the São Paulo Biennial.