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articles

No 2 (2021): lettres, lignes, tracés

Le grand Inoue Yûichi (1916-1985). Une œuvre de forme, une œuvre de sens, une œuvre de son

Submitted
April 23, 2021
Published
December 30, 2021

Abstract

The retrospective exhibition held at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris and at the Musée d'Albi in 2018 was an opportunity for the French public to rediscover the avant-garde Japanese calligrapher well known to post-war abstract artists in Europe and the United States. His work of large single characters revolutionised this thousand-year-old art inherited from China. A work of form, he drew oversized sinograms in intense hand-to-hand struggle with his brush and the ink he laid down on the paper.  As a work of meaning, by rediscovering zen masters stanzas  he pursues his acerbic criticism of the capitalist society of his country. In 1978, he ends up recording on a wall of paper the massacre of the children and parents of the primary school where he taught during a bombing in 1945. Finally, a work of sound, using a Conté pencil, his writing follows the narrative of Miyazaki Kenji's works, stopping in the middle of sentences, repeating the same word, crossing out whole sections of words. Revolutionary, he finds the origin of the calligraphy method described by the Chinese calligrapher Cai Yong (133-192) who compares calligraphy to a human being.