The Bokujin-Kai Group and Shiryu Morita  

1.  To research the aesthetic and philosophic expression of calligraphy; 2. To see calligraphy in the context of the whole life of a human being; 3. To establish calligraphy on the basis of modern art and theoretical ideas; 4. To see calligraphy in the larger perspective of all the arts; 5.  To expand calligraphy to a global scale;  6.  To re-examine and rediscover the classics; 7.  To elevate the social standing of calligraphy. 

-Shiryu Morita on the mission of the contemporary calligrapher in the first edition of Bokubi1 

      The seeds for an avant-garde calligraphy were first planted by Hidai Tenrai in his 1933 Calligraphy Art Society.2  Influenced by Hidai and his two major followers, Hidai Nankoku and Ueda Sokyu, Shiryu Morita followed their legacy in his active, influential and innovative role in the avant-garde calligraphic movement.  He was the editor and private publisher of the influential visual and literary journal Bokubi (Ink Art), which had connections to artists such as Franz Kline and introduced Japanese calligraphy to an international audience.3  Jiro Yoshihara was also a contributor to the journal and joined Shiryu Morita as a  leading member of the group Genbi, an acronym for Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai, or the “Contemporary Art Discussion Group.”4  Morita formed the Bokujin-Kai (“Ink Human Society”) society of calligraphers in 1952 with four other calligraphers.5 Focussed on individual study and expression, they avoided large exhibitions and organizations. 

      Their exploration of the calligraphic line was based on the theory of Lady Wei, a fourth-century Chinese calligrapher who declared that the line needed to be “like a human limb and have bone, muscle, flesh and skin.”6  The line must have qualities of depth and strength, moving through the white of the paper and energizing the white space through interaction with it. 7   The actual act of expressing the characters is in effect a performance in which the calligrapher must write without pause or self-correction.  He must concentrate and focus on the deliberateness of the expression, allowing for the flow of energy in his expressive movements.  Thus, the final work is an expression of the engagement of body and mind; it is a manifestation of the experience of the calligrapher within that ‘moment’ of time. Morita himself considers performance a key aspect to calligraphy and asserts that the piece must be written in “one piercing movement” 8  and must express the quality of sho, the force of life.9  Artists in the Bokujin-Kai group   moved to rethink tradition and made an effort to give calligraphic practice universal and international relevance.  They achieved this new vision through the implementation of freer forms but also by experimenting with unconventional materials such as “cardboard, sticks, and broom-sized brushes …  mineral pigments, oil paint, enamel, and lacquer in place of sumi ink … canvas, wood, ceramic and even glass for a surface other than paper.”10

        Morita encouraged calligraphers to step back from creating pure characters in order to revitalize the form of their expressions through experimentation with abstraction.  While experimentation with varied materials, brushstrokes and styles was encouraged, Morita insisted that the work must maintain its linguistic expression.  Although the Bokujin-kai found inspiration in American Abstract Expressionist works and Art Informel, Morita argued that whereas Western artists could create works in which they rejected or ignored the history of art, the calligrapher should practise within a centuries old tradition of the written language of Japan and China.11

       Morita’s assertion that calligraphy must express a character in order to be calligraphy points to an important controversy between practitioners of the medium in the postwar years.  At a time when the urge to  attain international relevance caused an outburst of experimentation and the reinvention of traditional practices, there was understandably a reaction against the complete abandonment of those traditions.  In the case of calligraphy, the issue of moji-sei and the identification of ‘calligraphy’ was debated.  Moji connotes the lexical part of the calligraphy, the bare minimum which expresses the language, whereas sei equates to the ‘quality’ of that expression.12  In his insistence that calligraphy must still be expressive of language, Morita believed that works must possess moji-sei in full to be considered calligraphy.  Other artists such as Jiro Yoshihara advocated for the abandonment of moji-sei altogether, seeing it as a limitation on artistic expression.13   This disagreement is evident in Yoshihara’s work in the Resounding Spirit exhibition, Blue Calligraphic Lines on Dark Blue, which is highly abstract and has no clearly referential character.  A fellow Bokujin-kai member, Inoue Yuichi, also broke away from the linguistic constraints and describes his experience vividly in his journal:

Turn your body and soul into a brush … NO to everything!  The hell with it!  Paint with all your strength – anything, anyhow!  Spread your enamel and let it gush out!  Splash it in the faces of respectable teachers of calligraphy.  Sweep away all those phonies who defer to calligraphy with a capital C … I will bore my way through, I will cut my way open.  The break is total.14 

      In his own art, Morita depicted characters so abstracted from their standard representation that often the title of the work (or an accompanying image) was needed to associate the inked form on canvas to the character he was expressing.15  Morita maintained moji-sei, but so abstractly that his art might be better identified as “abstract calligraphy.”16  In his work So (Deep and Abundant), he “wrote” a single character, placing particular emphasis upon visual expression through the energetic movement of his brushstrokes. Other works in the Resounding Spirit exhibition point to  more avant-garde calligraphic tradition,  such Shinoda Toko’s Unseen Form, inwhich he uses the traditional sumi ink and paper to  express the calligraphic line with unbounded sweeping and roughly geometric lines.