Resumen de Of modes and manners in Japanese ink painting: Sesshu's Splashed ink landscape of 1495
Splashed Ink Landscape by the Zen monk-painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506?) embodies a complex relation between medieval Japanese ink painting and artistic subjectivity. A careful study of the history and semantics of splashed ink and the painting’s inscriptions reveals Sesshū’s work to be a multifaceted pictorial artifact that reflects how monk-painters during Japan’s medieval period imagined artistic transmission in terms of a spiritual bloodline. It also demonstrates how using the splashed ink mode to formalize such transmission allowed the monk-painter to be cast as a cultivated gentleman according to classical literati aesthetic discourse.
