Caution
     [Works might] stick together!
     Mount them carefully only in the provided frames.

Scribbling anxiously and with haste, the handwritten note on the reverse reveals Inoue Yuichi’s mood at the moment of submitting Work B and one other work to the Second Bokujin Group Exhibition, which was held in October 1956. It was also the year when Inoue’s interest in fully calligraphic abstraction peaked.

Looking back on Inoue Yuichi’s artistic career, there are two critical junctions. One is his growing alienation from Morita Shiryu in the latter half of the 1960s, as both artists held different opinions on the future of calligraphy. This ultimately resulted in Inoue parting company with Morita as well as leaving the Bokujinkai group. Counting himself as a lone wolf and clinging to the vow he made at Ryoanji temple in 1952, he never gave up seeking for his own pure land of art, even if he felt increasingly isolated. The other of these two junctions is when in 1955 and 1956 Inoue chose to embrace pure abstraction, as opposed to just writing kanji characters. However, this phase did not last very long. In late 1956, Inoue returned to kanji, and in the following year submitted Gutetsu to the Fourth San Paulo Biennale, a work that was later regarded as marking the beginning of his unique path towards the reinvention of characters.

In the postwar years, the Japanese art communities, including avant-garde calligrapher groups, were excited about their newfound liberties after the war, but the emancipation from tradition was also followed by a feeling of disorientation. While the moderates struggled with the framework of conservative and conventional expectations of calligraphy, the radicals had already left behind calligraphic tradition in exchange for visual internationalization. For Inoue, Hasegawa Saburo played a key role in confronting this artistic crisis. Hasegawa, a polymath on Western art, introduced Inoue to concepts of European primitivism and children’s art. Primordiality signifies purity, and the infantility in children’s art manifests innocence in nature. Those elements led Inoue to dive into abstraction.

In denial of any connection to calligraphy, he used drawing paper instead of calligraphy paper, tried enamel instead of ink, and made his own brushes by binding the dried reeds together. The present work exemplifies the artist’s efforts in all these aspects. Through spontaneous gestures and movements, he freed himself from civilized common sense and projected the prelogical impulse of a human being into Work B.

Inoue’s Work series that centered on pure abstraction was an extremely probing undertaking created in a very short time. After his immersion in these intensive experiments, Inoue returned to kanji. In the following year, his overwhelmingly distinctive single-character calligraphy astonished the art world.

Inoue Yuichi (calligrapher; 1916–1985)
Born in Tokyo, Inoue studied calligraphy under Ueda Sokyu, an avant-garde calligrapher who also mentored Morita Shiryu. Inoue co-founded the calligraphers’ group Bokujinkai. His large-scale, experimental calligraphy of single Chinese characters resonated strongly with the concurrent movement of Abstract Expressionism and breathed new life into the calligraphy world in Japan. Regarded as daring and innovative, his works were widely exhibited in Japan and abroad, including Documenta 2 in Kassel (1959) and the São Paulo Biennial (1957, 1961).