Word: zens
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...many forms of Buddhism, the one best known in the West is Zen. Its guiding principles of inward meditation versus doctrine, of emphasis on the visceral and spontaneous as against the cerebral and structured, of inspiration rather than linear "logic," were seized on by the early beatniks, taken up by many of the young today, and were incorporated into the mystique of America's counterculture. But what kind of art did Zen provoke in China and Japan? In a brilliant show that took a year to assemble, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has provided a definitive survey...
...casual gallerygoer, Zen art might not appear vastly different from classical Oriental art and indeed is customarily exhibited as part of its main body without special classification. In fact, Zen is distinctive for two reasons: 1) it was created largely by Zen monks, who did not consider themselves primarily artists, to illustrate a philosophical Zen concept; 2) it had to be done with maximum spontaneity. In Zen, as opposed to the controlled symmetries of scholarly painting, the inky brush spatters and runs on the paper in a kind of ecstatic exuberance-a sort of Oriental forerunner of action painting...
THIS SPIRIT or personality that the Zen Buddhists tried to infuse in their writing is the same spirit they tried to infuse into each subject of their art. Portraiture ( Chinso in Japanse), "the core of Ch'an art which reveals the essence of Ch'an more directly than any other type of painting," is closely related to the Zen idea of doctrine transmission: each pupil who had achieved Enlightenment was given a portrait of his master with an inscription written by the master. The portrait's physical likeness and inscription both capture the spirit of the master; by looking...
Portraiture is the only form of Zen art that has a clearly defined function. Other paintings in Zen art, whether representations of eccentric poets or recluses, of sparrows or herons, of encounters, visits, or dialogues, have a purpose but no yet-discovered function. Paintings on the whole were not used as tools for instruction in Enlightenment; themes dealing with Nature might be looked at from the point of view of the Ch'an painter's awareness of "a single reality underlying the phenomena of nature." But, as the catalogue states, "the most obvious criterion for establishing what...
...order to understand what Zen art is see the Museum of Fine Arts Zen show first. Then you can observe the Zen in context of other Oriental art at the Fogg show. The MFA has captured the spirit of the Oriental. Like the Japanese who hang a single painting in the tokonoma (a small alcove in the house), the MFA has hung a single aspect of Oriental art: Zen art. The Fogg has taken a Western perspective and shown the Oriental from prehistoric times through the 19th century...