Morita Shiryū (1912–98) was a postwar Japanese artist who revolutionised Japanese calligraphy into a global avant-garde aesthetic. During the 1960s Morita’s work was fundamental to the introduction of Japanese artistic ideas to the Americas and Europe, and was central to the postwar international New Zen Boom and Zen’s influence on international abstract art.
Born Morita Kiyoshi in Toyooka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, the artist adopted the artist name Shiryū, meaning ‘dragon child’ in around 1925. In the late 1930s he moved to Tokyo to study under the avant-garde calligrapher Ueda Sōkyū. In 1943 he returned to his hometown and in 1948 moved to Kyoto to immerse himself in its artistic community. He was a founding member of Bokujinkai (‘Group of People of the Ink’), an association of artists that strove to bring the art of calligraphy to a position of international prominence. He edited the monthly journal Bokubi (Beauty of ink) from 1951 to 1981 and participated in meetings and exhibitions of the cross-genre study and discussion group Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group, Genbi).
In 1963, the year of his first international solo exhibition, Shiryū travelled through the United States and four European countries where he lectured on the ‘Appeal of a Japanese Calligrapher’, gave calligraphy demonstrations and presented a movie that showed Japan’s avant-garde calligraphers at work. These activities were well received among the American and European abstract expressionists. Shortly after the war, Shiryū succeeded in elevating Japanese calligraphy, a traditional art form embedded in East Asian culture, to the world stage by transforming his words and body movements into artistic expression.
Combining a time-honoured philosophical art form with a strong intent to innovate, Morita Shiryū introduced postwar Japanese calligraphy to the world. Generously acquired by the Felton Bequest, his Kanzan, 1969, joined the NGV Collection in 2024.
This coincided with a global interest in Zen philosophy, the international activities of the respected Japanese Zen essayist, philosopher and religious scholar DT Suzuki, and the publication of popular literature like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Maynard Pirsig. Meanwhile, the activities of the Bokujinkai and Shiryū launched artistic and intellectual exchanges with many prominent international abstract artists including Pierre Soulages, Franz Kline and Pierre Alechinsky.
The great artistic and philosophical exchange between Shiryū and Soulages is a notable twentieth-century association that resonates to the present day, and earlier this year was celebrated by an exhibition of the two artists’ work at the Tadao Ando designed Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.
Kanzan 1969 is one of Shiryū’s largest and most powerful works. Its giant expressive brushstrokes are an abstracted representation of the character ‘Kanzan’, a legendary monk-poet who is considered in Zen Buddhism to be the embodiment of free spirit and the path to enlightenment. Experimenting with new and originally conceived materials for calligraphy, during the 1960s Shiryū broke away from the traditions of black ink on white paper and used a huge calligraphy brush with a pigment made from aluminium flakes to create works on black paper that were coated with lacquer or varnish. After meditative preparation, Shiryū would walk barefoot across the paper executing brush strokes with speed and vigour often in less than a minute, loading the brush with the aluminium flake pigment only once. The order and direction of the brush’s movement can be followed in the finished painting, starting from the bright dot at the top, then the large stroke from left to right, and a series of smaller strokes from left to right at the bottom.
Mounted into a four-panel screen, this work is one of Shiryū’s most impressive and has been exhibited in North America, Europe and Japan.
Wayne Crothers is NGV Senior Curator, Asian Art.
See Morita Shiryū’s Kanzan, 1969, on Level 3, NGV International from 22 November. The NGV warmly thanks the Felton Bequest for acquiring this work for the Collection.
This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, Nov-Dec 2024.