Year-end Reflections

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Art Newspaper, Comments on “Year-end Reflections 2021”

Special Issue on Year-end Reflections

1. Name: Inada Sōsai

2. Title: Bokujinkai President

3. What was the most impressive or memorable movement or event in the world of shodō this year?

  1. The Bokujinkai holds an annual Bokujin public exhibition in the spring (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) and fall (Kyocera Museum of Art, Kyoto). Although we had to cancel the Tokyo exhibition in May this year, we were able to hold the Kyoto exhibition in November and present our works to a large number of visitors.
  2. We also held an exhibition of works by Morita Shiryū, a founding member of the Bokujinkai, at the Shibunkaku galleries in Kyoto and Tokyo, and were once again able to appreciate a part of his oeuvres.
  3. The Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou Exhibition at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art was also memorable.

4. What deserves special mention in the next section? And why?

  1. Amusingly reading Matsuoka Seigō’s Totally Art from the “Thousand Nights, Thousand Books” edition, while being completely exhausted in its thickness as a paperback. Not being able to hear about Morita Shiryū’s views of sho and of Tomioka Tessai’s calligraphy in the painter’s Tessai taisei (Tessai’s Great Accomplishments) before daybreak.

5. Other thoughts at the end of the year and aspirations for the New Year, etc.

An exhibition of works by Morita Shiryū and French painter Pierre Soulages is planned to be held from March to May 2022 at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art (we look forward to how it will turn out).

* We are planning to digitize the Bokujin magazine (currently in its 710th issue) and other publications to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Bokujinkai.
* Morita Shiryū oversaw the editing of Bokubi magazine until its last issue 301 but he published 26 issues of Ryūmon (Dragon Gate) as a way to think about the importance of rinsho, copying exemplary models, and to research this form of practice. We have been preparing to reissue these together with issue 54 of the Sōryū Correspondence Course magazine for forty years.
* The 2019 publication of The Complete Works of Morita Shiryū, 1952–1998

For the last fifty years, I have been trying to live a fresh and more meaningful life in sho, devoting my whole body and soul to the framework of selected characters and seeing my own existence in the lines I have written.