Post-War Japanese Calligraphy

Our gallery show, Post-War Japanese Calligraphy, features a group of avant-garde masters with the focus on Yuichi Inoue (1916-1985) and Shiryu Morita (1912-1998), artists whose works straddle East and West, combining dramatic, performative gesture and near-abstraction with the rich lexical and graphic heritage of the Chinese script. Inoue's large Tora (Tiger, 1963), executed in ink on Japanese paper, is both a free interpretation of the character for "tiger" and an abstracted depiction of the animal. Morita's sprawling Kanzan (1961) is another large-scale calligraphy. Made up of two exploded characters for the name of a famous Chinese poet, its few bold strokes evoke Kanzan's free and creative spirit.