Landscape

Kaiho Yusho excelled in the painting tradition associated with Zen Buddhism in which the notion of emptiness is expressed in the tranquil disintegration of the physical world and the opening of a timeless and infinite void. He created vast expanses of water and space balanced by land masses of marshy shores and distant mountains. His vistas were of rivers and lakes, the humid environs of cloud and mist that shrouded rocks, trees, and peaks, obscuring even great monasteries and rendering human figures small and nearly inconsequential. The mastery of Yusho’s brush is seen not only in the dark, emphatic character of his rocky promontories and sharply delineated roof lines but especially in his use of subtle, finely graduated washes of ink and gold that convey an amorphous, ambiguous quality of emergence and ultimate dissolution of the illusionary material world.