Splashed Ink and Cloudy Mountains: Sesshū’s Creation of a Literati Landscape in Late Medieval Japan

The splashed-ink landscape appeared in fifteenth-century Japan as a new modality of painting characterized by its planar, gesticular application of sumi ink to paper. While claiming roots in an earlier tradition of Chinese painting, the technique's most important representative for Japanese painters was the Southern Song (1127-1249) monk-painter Yujian. Only a few Japanese artists embraced Yujian’s splashed-ink mode; foremost among them was the seminal medieval painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420-ca.1506). Indeed, over Sesshū’s long career the splashed-ink mode emerged as one of the artist’s signature styles.

Unlike other landscapes styles for which the Japanese painter is known, the splashed-ink mode has traditionally been understood as little informed by Sesshū’s travel to China in 1467. Indeed, Yujian was a largely forgotten figure and his splashed-ink style virtually obsolete in the painting scene that Sesshū encountered on the continent. This presentation readdresses this fundamental dimension of Sesshū’s practice by examining how the formal consistency of the splashed-ink style in Sesshū’s oeuvre belies the painter’s conscious recoding of the technique’s semantic implications in his post-China career. Sesshū, I argue, reinvented the splashed-ink style as an effective medium through which the professional Japanese painter could project himself as an amateur literatus artist by transmuting the splashed-ink landscape of the past into the cloudy-mountain landscape of the present. In so doing, this paper probes the seemingly invisible ways in which interregional contact in medieval East Asia can and must be excavated from the visual record.