Kanzan was a legendary monk-poet of the Tang dynasty considered in Buddhism as the embodiment of a person leading an ideal life of freedom on the path to enlightenment. Togerher with many other East Asian philosophical and cultural topics, Kanzan to some degree became known in the West due to the efforts of sinologists and Buddhist scholars of the prewar years. How such subject matter gained traction once more in the West after 1945 is carefully elaborated by Dr. Bogdanova-Kummer in her essay in this catalog. According to her argument, inspiration from Asian cultural lore was now “taken up by the next generation of poets,” the “prominent figures in English-language poetry of its time.” As Euro-American intellectuals were approaching Japanese art from a broader point of view, academic attention gave way to more comprehensive cultural interest that was now becoming part of the mainstream.

The painter and art critic Hasegawa Saburo reasoned that the newfound interest among Western postwar intellectuals was in parts due to a certain universalism in Japanese art that fostered this change. Moreover, he believed that Zen and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi provided a philosophical alternative for coping with life to those who had suffered through the horrors of World War II. Hasegawa saw Zen as a means suited to reconcile to gap between increasing material well-being of the postwar generation and a brooding lack of inner flufillment that he considered endemic to the cultural climate of 1950s America. The character of Kanzan is a symbol of an independently-minded indivisual and of originality and uniqueness in East Asian art that postwar Japanese artists including Morita sought inspiration from in order to build their own universalism.

Morita Shiryu (avant-garde calligrapher; 1912–1998)
Avant-garde calligrapher from Hyogo Prefecture. Like fellow artist Inoue Yuichi, Morita studied under the calligraphy master Ueda Sokyu. He co-founded the avant-garde group Bokujinkai together with Inoue and was the founder and editor of the journal Bokubi (Beauty of Ink), both of which revolutionized traditional Japanese calligraphy and spread knowledge of Japanese avant-garde calligraphy to an international audience. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor with Dark Blue Ribbon.