Sakaki Hyakusen

Yatsuhashi

102.71 cm by 27.8 cm

First half of the 18^th century

1969/1.105

Museum purchase made possible by the Margaret Watson Parker Art Collection Fund

Yatsuhashi by Sakaki Hyakusen is a painting that uses a visual vocabulary to unite internal notions of emotions and memories with external notions of nature and the land. The artist, Hyakusen, was a Japanese painter associated with the Nanga (or literati) school of painting in Edo-period (1600-1868) Japan. The Nanga school was inspired by Chinese literati painting, where Japanese painters involved would study Chinese literature and painting styles. Unlike many other literati painters before this time, Hyakusen was not of the samurai class, but was a townsman who presented himself as a professional painter, making painting his livelihood.

The painting itself seems sparse, with the open, creamy-white space of the hanging scroll providing an expansive, empty backdrop for the painting’s very deliberate yet parsimonious , paint strokes. The painted image at the bottom of the scroll is somewhat abstract and impressionistic, where the heaviness and wateriness of the ink and the broadness of the strokes construct an image that references actual flowers — water-blotted stems, the curved, broad strokes as flower petals, with smaller darker lines within, express the delicate subtleties of the flowers using counterintuitively blunt, yet exact, strokes.

A short poem has been written above this image, its strokes similarly sparse and deliberate, borrowing from the painting’s qualities of heavy and light, curved yet spare. It reads, “… On the bridge posts, I laid down my brush, the iris…” This painting reveals the link between text, emotion and visual landscape, as the painting contains deliberate references to the ninth chapter in Tale of Ise, which is a collection of stories that probably took its present form in the eleventh century. The story itself imbues this painting with significance and context. The title of the painting, the word “yatsuhashi,” means “eight bridges,” alluding directly to the story where a man and his two friends come across a place known as Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province. Before them, the river is broken into eight channels and each channel is crossed by a bridge. The great number of passageways before them presents a decision that the men need to make, and their decision to instead stop and sit at Yatsuhashi, composing a poem about the irises that sit “luxuriantly in the swamp,” implies a sort of indecisiveness, a sort of feeling of being confused and lost and unwilling to move further. These emotions of homesickness and desire to return home are echoed in a poem one of the men composes at Yatsuhashi:

I have a beloved wife,

Familiar as the skirt

Of a well-worn robe,

And so this distant journeying

Fills my heart with grief.[i]

The text itself builds a sort of emotional landscape where the reader experiences these feelings of homesickness and detachment along with the characters themselves through the elements of landscape. Here the visual idea of the eight bridges signifies the choice of being confronted with many paths, all leading one away from home, and the iris itself becomes a symbol that is associated with one of the men’s wives and the grief contained in journeying away from her, and thus, the grief in journeying away from what one if familiar with.

The painting Yatsuhashi alludes to this tie between nature and human emotion. Hyakusen uses a sparse visual vocabulary to create an abstract landscape that, even in its emptiness and bareness, evokes meaning and extends beyond itself, where the flowers, constructed by inky blots of gray, become more than meaningless flora — they develop meaning by their allusion to the irises of Yatsuhashi, becoming not only irises in the context of the story, but becoming symbolic of an entire journey, and entire world, wherein grief, sadness, and heartbreak are found fluent in images of beauty. It is this connection between nature and the personal, as reflected in Tales of Ise, that allows even the most sparsely constructed, abstract images to allude to entire physical and emotional landscapes, where “realities of man and the natural world are merged into a single experience,”[ii] where experiencing even the simple ink drawings of irises can bring forth an entire emotional experience.

It is using these links between image, landscape and emotion that Hyakusen summons a world of sadness and experience with a simple ink drawing. The power within Japanese painting and literature is the desire of these art forms to connect with the viewer on a visceral level, where the painting achieves its greatest goal, becoming what the Chinese painter and theorist called, “landscapes in which one may dwell.”[iii] This painting becomes an emotional ground for venturing through, as when one gazes upon Hyakusen’s piece, one is not gazing on simple ink lines, but a vast, unknown land where one travels farther and father away from what one loves. It is through this bringing together of the emotional and the visual that Hyakusen creates a painting that becomes a landscape of inner emotion, where not only do the eyes feast on the imagery, but the spirit lives in the emotional landscapes presented, roaming through and dwelling on the union of human inner emotion and external nature and land.

Whitney Pow

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[i] Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan.Trans. Helen C. McCollough. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968. Web. 15 Dec. 2009, 74-75.

[ii] Adams, Celeste, Paul Berry, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and University of Michigan. Museum of Art. Heart Mountains and Human Ways : Japanese Landscape and Figure Painting. Houston: The Museum, 1983, Introduction, pp. 5-16 (on poetry and nature, overview of tradition), 6.

[iii] Kuo Hsi (Guo Xi), An Essay on Landscape Painting, Shio Sakanishi, trans. (London, 1959), 52-70. 22-51, introduction, preface & “Comments on Landscape,” 34.