Haboku Sansui (landscape)

At first glance, Sesshu Toyo's Haboku Sansui hanging scoll appears almost unfinished. Mountains dissolve into washes of ink, trees emerge through a few abrupt strokes and large areas of the paper are left untouched. Made in 1495, during the later Muromachi period, it is one of Sesshu Toyo's most important works. He works with diluted washes, dark pools of ink, overlapping tonal masses, sudden brush marks and large areas of empty paper. Mountains, cliffs, vegetation, buildings, figures and a boat can be recognised, but they are not described through meticulous outlines. Instead, they seem to emerge slowly from the ink. The painting is not abstract in the modern Western sense because it does not abandon representation. We can still recognise the world it refers to. Yet he asks how little information is necessary for that recognition to occur. A mountain can be suggested by a dark mass, mist can exist simply as untouched paper, a tree can emerge through a few gestures of the brush. Representation is therefore produced through suggestion rather than description. The unpainted paper can suggest mist, atmosphere, water, distance or spatial separation. It is not merely the space where Sesshu has chosen not to paint. Emptiness becomes an active element of the composition. The viewer's eye moves between what has been marked with ink and what has deliberately been left open. The painting was originally made for Josui Soen, a disciple of Sesshu. Before leaving his teacher, he asked Sesshu for a painting that could serve as evidence of his artistic inheritance. The work therefore had a very particular social function. It was a landscape, but it was also a gift, a certificate of artistic transmission, an endorsement of a student and a record of the relationship between master and disciple. The work's history becomes even more interesting when Soen later travels through Kyoto. There, six prominent Zen monks associated with The Gozan or five mountains system added poems to the upper part of the scroll. The painting consequently accumulated another layer of cultural authority.