or some time now it has been difficult tomake sweeping statements about the natureand history of literati painting in East Asia.Scholarly inquiry of the past several decadeshas balkanized what was once comfortablyviewed as a self-contained tradition of paint-ing by scholar-amateurs with shared prin-ciples. According to the once-prevailing view,literati painting originated among Chinesescholar-officials of the eleventh century andwas centered on the ideals of friendship,classical learning, and naturalness of expres-sion, pictorially expressed through a cir-cumscribed menu of allegorical subjects andan array of unpolished brush effects, thecorollary of which was an aversion to so-called courtly or professional modes of pic-torial representation. Now this putativetradition tends to be understood as a con-stellation of individual and local practicesthat were only loosely related and all sig-nificantly marked by differing historical andregional contingencies.1 Compared to a gen-eration ago, there is now a much greaterawareness of the constructedness of theliterati canon, with regard to not only the“Southern School” genealogy outlined bythe influential scholar-official and aestheti-cian Dong Qichang (1555–1636), but alsothe pan-Asian literati tradition formulated inthe 1910s and 1920s by Chinese and Japan-ese painter-intellectuals.2

Considerable effort has also been devotedto local excavations of the socioeconomic

conditions and commercial nature of literaticultural transactions.3 These conditionswere frequently masked by the rhetoric oflofty amateurism, the conceit that the literatipainter painted only for his or her own enjoy-ment or that of friends. Long accepted atface value, this rhetoric was especially wellreceived in the English-language sphere dur-ing the early postwar period, when the ColdWar provided a framework within whichthe literati ideal of autonomous artistic pro-duction was overvalorized.4 Greater sensi-tivity to the gaps between this posture andthe circumstances of livelihood and exchangethat underpinned it has enabled a vastlymore nuanced understanding of literati sub-jectivity and sociality.5 Moreover, the modeof painting with which this layered subjec-tivity is associated can now be more preciselyunderstood as merely one of several spheres—along with poetry, calligraphy, and theauthorship of specific categories of texts—inwhich this particular form of selfhood wasperformed and maintained.6 Such insightsalso go a long way toward illuminating the complex economies of obligation andexchange within which literati artifactsacquired meaning and value.

This essay attempts to build on this newawareness in the study of literati painting byfurther exploring the inner mechanics ofthe newly articulated performative aspect of literati cultural production through anexamination of the paintings of the Japanese

167

Urakami Gyokudo: An Intoxicology

of Japanese Literati Painting

F

YUKIO LIPPITHarvard University

1. Urakami Gyokudo,Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow(Toun shisetsu zu), c. 1811–1812, vertical hanging scroll,ink and light colors on paperKawabata Foundation, KanagawaPrefecture

2. Urakami Gyokudo, HazyMist Captured amidMountains (Roen jakuji zu),c. 1815, vertical hangingscroll, ink on paperIdemitsu Art Museum, Tokyo

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artist Urakami Gyokudo (1745–1820).7 Morefamous in his own time as a musician andpoet, Gyokudo was rediscovered early in thetwentieth century for his small corpus oflandscape paintings, remarkable in theirsketchy and brooding appeal (fig. 1). Exe-cuted on paper in mostly monochrome ink,these paintings are typically accompanied by poetic inscriptions and signatures inGyokudo’s inimitable seal-script calligraphy.Most are landscapes conjured up through an accumulation of rapid, horizontal, andabbreviated brushstrokes combined withrhythmically peppered dabs that result in

shimmering, kinetically charged represen-tations (fig. 2). Gyokudo’s oeuvre departs sodramatically from anything else in the literaticanon that this alterity alone would sufficeto render him deserving of sustained criticalexamination. In this instance, however, it isGyokudo’s reputation as the drunken painterpar excellence that makes him such an in-triguing case study in literati pictorialism.

The relationship of Gyokudo’s art to alco-hol has until now been assumed rather thanassessed. But a proper assessment is crucial,if only because the trope of the drunkenartist had a long history in East Asian cul-

tural production; Gyokudo’s instantiationof it needs at least to be brought into con-sideration as the primary context for hisreception, both in his own time and later on,as a scholar-amateur unfettered by conven-tion. If literati cultural production was meantin large part to authenticate the fidelity of itscreators and recipients to the ideals cherishedby the imagined community to which theyclaimed membership—erudition, autonomy,friendship, and amateurism—the conversewas also true: the cultural authenticity of aliterati artifact had to be guaranteed by thesocial reputations of its creator and owner.Oftentimes their good standing was attestedto by the work’s textual enclosures, includ-ing its title, occasional and signatorial inscrip-tion, and, most important, its colophons.

In the realm of painting, however, inscrip-tive accoutrements could only do so much.The general principles of literati identityalways had to be somehow manifest in thepictorial representation itself. The role ofliteratus was a mode of being that was con-tinuously performed through, among otherthings, specific pictorial strategies and brusheffects. Although textual enclosures couldprovide more specific information concern-ing the circumstances of exchange and sit-uate the work more precisely in accordancewith any local consensus governing the pro-tocols of scholar-official production, themorphology of a painted object was ulti-mately what rendered it legible as an artifactof literati aspirations.

A key question that governs this inquiryis in what balance the rules of literati markmaking operated alongside the narrativeframes that enabled its acceptance as some-how authentic. Gyokudo’s case is a reminderthat these frames could contribute to theoverall semantic agenda of a literati paintingby conveying a complementary rhetoricalstructure emphasizing certain dispositions—including drunkenness, playfulness, reclu-sion, unwillingness, or even madness—tofacilitate the recognition of the work as aproperly literati representation. Althoughsuch dispositions are not reflected in allliterati paintings, or perhaps even in themajority, where they do appear they offerinsight into the ways a communicativeagenda could be crafted through the careful

symbiosis of word and image. With regard to Gyokudo, these insights are all the moretrenchant for the way in which facture and rhetoric were so thoroughly imbri-cated. Thus a sober examination of his self-representation facilitates a heightened sen-sitivity not only to his brush dynamics butalso, more generally, to patterns of personi-fication in literati visual representation as awhole.

Such an inquiry is best prefaced by a con-sideration of the rules of amateur painterlyexpression on which Gyokudo’s painting wasgenerally premised. It was axiomatic that aliterati painter cultivate the appearance ofamateurishness in his or her work in order todistinguish it from what the Chinese scholar-official and literati aesthetic theorist DongQichang (1555–1636) called “the demonworld” of professional painting.8 Doing sowas, however, a much trickier propositionthan might be supposed, for there was neverany clear consensus as to what an authenti-cally amateur painting looked like, or how alack of professional skill should be commu-nicated in the ink-painting medium. Indeed,in the history of literati painting, a widerange of painterly effects were coded as non-professional over the centuries. Most painterswho assumed the ideals of the scholar-official class in fact usually had some facil-ity with the painter’s brush and developedsophisticated techniques of de-skilling inorder to cultivate an amateurity of expression.Some turned to the ancients for models of a primitive pictorial appearance; others transposed the brush habits of calligraphichandwriting to the realm of painting; andstill others defined their amateurism in con-sistently negative terms simply as non-professional painting, consisting primarily ofabsences: the absence of expensive materialssuch as silk or mineral pigments, of elaboratecompositions or minute details, and of other-wise prettifying gestures. It helped that thereemerged a wide-ranging menu of allegoricalsubjects, including bamboo, orchids, and with-ered trees, all part of an iconography of literativirtue, that lent itself well to the demon-stration of purposeful undercrafting.

As mentioned above, the adoption of semifictitious personas also enhanced the

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reception of a painting as a reflection of theunadorned self. But eventually the mostcommon method by which to achieve theappearance of the dilettante who paintedonly for friends was to mimic the approachesof earlier exemplars of the genre. Ironically,over time those qualities most prized inliterati discourse, such as clumsiness, awk-wardness, and blandness, came to be mostreadily captured through the attributes of proficiency, facility, and dexterity. The wide-spread dissemination and extreme conven-tionalization of literati methods over thecenturies thus gave rise to an orthodoxy ofexpression and a chronic condition of pro-fessional amateurism.

In China by the seventeenth century, thepretence of amateurism in the literati tra-dition was nearly defunct. As Richard Vino-grad has written, “What [remained] of theoriginal impulse [was] largely the associationwith educated artists and the embellish-ment of paintings with texts.”9 This wasthe state in which literati painting was firstpracticed as a significant mode of pictorialrepresentation in Korea in the seventeenthcentury and Japan in the eighteenth cen-tury. In all three countries, painting in thescholar-amateur mode was carried out underconditions that might be understood ashighly inauthentic, even fraudulent, withregard to its initial rhetorical axioms. But itis not as if all painters employing this idiomwere unaware of their bad faith. Indeed,those painters for whom the practice of a rei-fied mode of literati painting was a source ofanxiety have almost without exceptionearned a place in the modern art historicalcanon. In China, there emerged among themore ambitious of artists a variety of visualand rhetorical approaches for overcomingthe literati dilemma that took as their pointof departure this conventionalized pictorialidiom. Some of the most startling new formsof pictorial expression to emerge during thisperiod can be understood under the rubric ofa quixotic search for an authentically ama-teur form of literati pictorial expression, asreflected in the Chinese painter Shitao(1642–1707) and his concept of the One-stroke (yihua).10 It is within this trajectoryof the pursuit of skill-lessness that Gyokudocan most profitably be situated when exam-

ining his unique brush effects and intoxicatedpersonations.

Gyokudo was a samurai official from theKamogata Ikeda domain of Bizen Province,located in what is now Okayama Prefec-ture in the western part of Japan’s mainisland. He was most famous during his ownlifetime as a practitioner and instructor ofthe qin, or seven-stringed Chinese zither, aninstrument with a small but committed fol-lowing among intellectuals of the Edo period(1615–1868). After the age of forty-nine,however, when he requested and received arelease from his administrative duties anddomainal affiliation, Gyokudo pursued amostly itinerant lifestyle, traveling up anddown the archipelago with his two sons,teaching music, composing poetry, and frat-ernizing with a countrywide network ofsinophile friends and patrons. Even aftersettling down in Kyoto for the last decade ofhis life, Gyokudo continued to engage literatipeers and secured a singular, if minor, pres-ence in the world of letters. It was a by-product of these pursuits, a small corpus oflandscape paintings dating almost entirelyto his late years, that ensured Gyokudo’sposthumous fame. Admiration of theseworks was initially limited to a small groupof cognoscenti, including fellow literati suchas Tanomura Chikuden (1777–1835). DuringGyokudo’s lifetime, his precocious sonShunkin (1779–1846) was in fact morewidely recognized as a painter than hisfather.11 And because Gyokudo did not takeon painting students, he lacked an artisticlineage that could carry his legacy into themodern era, unlike other literati painterssuch as Ikeno Taiga (1723–1776) and TaniBuncho (1761–1840).

Instead, Gyokudo was rediscovered in thetwentieth century primarily as a painterrather than a litterateur or musician. Thecontours of this reception were shaped bypainters such as Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924),an early enthusiast who so admired Gyokudothat he is known to have repeatedly and rit-ually transcribed a short autobiographicaltext by his predecessor titled MizukaraGyokudo no kabe ni shirusu (Gyokudo’swall writing).12 By the 1920s, when the literatipainting tradition was receiving renewed

attention, many Japanese painters embracedGyokudo as an important early example ofan East Asian painter who worked throughthe traditional literati idiom to achieve astrikingly modern pictorial expression. Theartists Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1944) andYano Kyoson (1890–1965) inaugurated thescholarly study of Gyokudo by authoringthe first book-length monographs on hispainting, both published in 1926.13

Practitioners were not the only ones engen-dering the production of knowledge aboutGyokudo: a market for his paintings quicklyemerged, attracting prominent Japaneseindustrialist collectors of the prewar period.Ohara Magosaburo (1880–1943), who foundedJapan’s earliest museum of Western art in1930, was so enamored of the painter that hesponsored the publication of Gyokudo’s firstcatalogue raisonné in 1939.14 As the cata-logue reveals, however, by this time thepainter’s reputation as an authentic Japaneseliteratus and modernist avant la lettre wasso well entrenched that a small cottageindustry of Gyokudo forgeries striving for a“Gyokudo effect” had emerged, mediatingand compromising the ever-expanding aware-ness of his work (a problem that continuesto plague his commentators today). Gyokudo’sreputation was even internationalized inthe prewar era through the efforts of theGerman architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938),an enthusiast of Japanese artistic traditionswho was already familiar through his des-ignation of the Katsura Villa as an icon offunctionalist architecture. Taut championedGyokudo as yet another product of pre-modern Japanese culture that anticipated amodernist movement, in this case impres-sionism.15 The high regard for Gyokudo continued after the war, when he served asinspiration for writers such as Yoshikawa Eiji(1892–1962) and Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), who modeled protagonists after himand infused their stories with what theyimagined to be his worldview.16

The image of Gyokudo shared by theartists and collectors responsible for histwentieth-century reception was of an indi-vidualist and idealist who abandoned thetedium of bureaucracy to lead a life devotedto friends, travel, poetry, music, and paint-ing, the pursuit of which was lubricated by

a relentless affinity for alcohol. The basicfacts of his life and few surviving accountsof his character do not contradict this profile.The same is true of the considerable amountof new material about Gyokudo brought to light after World War II, this time by professional scholars and curators.17 Theemphasis in the postwar literature on theintroduction of new works and biographicalinformation, however, has resulted more in theaccumulation of entries on his timeline thanin a meaningful alteration of the architectureof his identity, already firmly established bycommentators in the 1920s and 1930s.

This is not to say, however, that raw mate-rial is lacking for the presentation of a lessromanticized assessment of Gyokudo’s cul-tural production and historical profile. Inthis regard, recent explorations of Gyokudo’ssocial networks and musical practice providethe most significant vectors of future inquiry.Sugimoto Yoshihisa has illuminated thecomplexity of the relationships Gyokudoformed as a young domainal official duringhis frequent stays in Edo during the 1770sand 80s, as well as their effect on his intel-lectual formation.18 His encounter and last-ing friendship with the Confucian scholarTamada Mokuo (1697–1785) and his circle in1774, for example, drew Gyokudo to a vig-orously practical form of neo-Confucian phi-losophy embraced by mercantile intellectualsof the eighteenth century.19 At the sametime, Gyokudo developed his practice ofChinese-style poetry through friendshipswith Mori Kokyu (1730–1786) and other second-generation disciples of the philo-logically oriented Confucianist Ogyu Sorai(1666–1729).20 Versifying peers also includedscholars associated with the Nobeokadomain in Hyuga Province (present-dayMiyazaki Prefecture in Kyushu), whose lordNaito Seiyo (1737–1781) studied the qinwithGyokudo in Edo.21 These overlapping butsemi-discrete groups provided a social matrixwithin which the samurai-official gainedaccess to national networks of meaning andsinophile cultural practice. The rich hori-zontal associations formed in Edo wouldalso provide Gyokudo with his first exposureto intellectual movements that later infusedhis own musical and painterly practice, suchas Wang Yangming philosophy (Oyomei in

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Japanese) and the National Learning (Koku-gaku) movement.22

Of equal interest and closely related tothese scholarly networks are Gyokudo’sactivities in Sino-Japanese musicology.23 Hestudied the qin with the Edo scholar TakiRankei (1732–1801). Because Rankei was anofficial physician to the shogunate, Gyokudomay also have studied Chinese medicinewith him and may have earned income him-self as a physician and herbalist.24 AlthoughGyokudo’s interests in Chinese pharmacol-ogy demonstrate that medical and musicalknowledge were to some extent intertwinedduring the Edo period, it was his interest inreviving a tradition of early Japanese courtsong known as saibara that makes his musi-cianship historically significant.25 Remark-ably, his study of ancient saibara involvedtheir transcription into the notational systemand scale structure employed for the qin,leading to a novel, disjunctive musical expres-sion that was not without its critics.26

Gyokudo’s study of court music of theHeian period (794–1185) was closely relatedto his association with leading members ofthe National Learning movement, whichgrew out of Shinto scholarship and revivedinterest in so-called nativist cultural tradi-tions while asserting the political centralityof the imperial court. It has also been argued,however, that his interest in saibara reflectedthe strong influence of Ogyu Sorai’s philo-logical approach to classical texts, applied tomusic. According to this thesis, Gyokudo’sstudy of long-extinct indigenous musicaltraditions reflected his desire to reconstructthe aural environment of wise rulers in earlyJapan, so that rulers in the present couldbetter follow their example. Gyokudo’s seventeen-year period of itinerancy betweenhis retirement from domainal responsibili-ties and settlement in Kyoto (1794–1811),moreover, has been attributed to his single-minded pursuit of musical study and revival,which involved visits to numerous shrinesaround the archipelago.27

Whatever the merits of this argument, inits very overdetermination, the intellectualgenealogy of Gyokudo’s nativist musicol-ogy reflects the rich and diverse world ofletters in which he moved from the early partof his administrative career. And what isnow known about his intellectual forma-

tion and ideological commitments providesa more precise and animated interpretativeframework for his ink paintings and painterlydispositions.

Here, however, it is at an operational regis-ter that Gyokudo’s artistic persona will beexamined, more specifically his drunkencomportment. With regard to most of his cul-tural production, especially his poetry andpainting, Gyokudo’s indulgence in wine isnot only a continuously sounded theme butthe announced precondition of representa-tion. The retired samurai-official expressedhis allegiance to states of inebriation directlyon the surfaces of his paintings, not only inseals that read Suisen (Drunken Immortal)and Suikyo (Drunkenville) but also in signa-torial inscriptions such as Gyokudo (kinshi)suisaku (drunkenly painted by Gyokudo).28

Much of his poetry is also suffused with adrowsy stupor, at times rapturous and attimes melancholic, induced by the emptyingof wine cups. A poem from the Sanko (Moun-tain travels) section of his first poetry anthol-ogy, Gyokudo kinshi shu (Collection ofGyokudo the qin player, 1794), is one amongmany examples that could be cited:29

Tipsy among the trees and flowers, I fell asleepby a pond;

Amid the fragrant grasses, a golden butterflyfluttered.

Now, waking up sober at dawn, where is thespringtime?

Its fragrance remains in the grasses caught inthe teeth of my clogs.30

Other poems were less indirect:

At dawn I drink three or four cups of sake,At dusk I chew on a piece of meat.Cool wind comes to fan my face,The flavor of the wine is rich and mellow.31

Gyokudo’s fondness for wine was men-tioned in virtually every surviving con-temporary account of him. Chikuden, forexample, featured Gyokudo’s “intoxicatedbrush” (suiyo no fude) in his colophon toEnkacho (Album of fog and mist, 1811), andprovided the following account of his olderfriend in his diary, Sanchujin jozetsu (Pratt-lings of a mountain hermit, 1814):

Among the Ancients were those who borrowedinspiration from wine to produce paintings

and calligraphies. Ki Gyokudo too followedthis course. Intoxication bears within it anexperience of the heavens themselves and isthus quite unlike the concerted action of mor-tals. Gyokudo would first begin to enter intothe appropriate spirit when drinking, and oncehe lowered his brush to paper it would not staystill. When the inspiration lessened, he woulddesist. In such a manner, for a single scroll, hewould sometimes repeat the cycle over tentimes. Works thus inspired attracted all whosaw them, and were brimming with flavor nomatter how much one partook of them. Whenhe became too drunk, however, his brushworkdevolved, and his buildings, trees, and rockswould become undistinguishable.32

Or, as follows in Section 84 of Chikudensoshiyu garoku (Old Man Chikuden’s record ofpaintings by teachers and friends):

Each morning Gyokudo would rise early, cleanup the room, burn incense, and play the qin.Between five and seven in the morning hewould drink three cups of sake and often say,“It is as if I had the Emperor’s Imperial order to adjust the musical pitch, and being in thatsituation I must devote myself to it.”33

Finally, in Chikudenso shiwa (Old ManChikuden’s discussions of poetry), the liter-atus described Gyokudo as follows:

In the winter of 1807, Gyokudo, who wasskilled at the qin, met with me at the Jimyo-inand we lived there, eating and sleeping, formore than forty days. He was then in his sixties; his hair was white and his beard long.Yet he still looked young and sang quite well;he was not bothered by the hollows where his teeth had fallen out. It was marvelous. He enjoyed wine in particular, and when hebecame drunk would compose short poems,each of which would always mention the qin.Gyokudo would also compose small landscapescenes, the brushwork of which was highlytextured. Neither [poetry nor painting] wouldconform to convention but were excellent andfull of charm (omomuki).34

The artist’s relationship to alcohol describedhere was confirmed in his epitaph, authoredby the famous poet Rai San’yo (1780–1832),a close friend of Shunkin: “When someonerequested a painting, he would drink beforetaking up the brush, and then joyously paintwith great refinement.”35

As San’yo’s epitaph and the numerousaccounts of Chikuden demonstrate, Gyo-

kudo’s drunken persona provided the frame-work through which his contemporariesunderstood and appreciated his artistry. Con-versely, and in keeping with the literati cultof personality, Gyokudo’s artistry was alsoa means through which his contemporariescould appreciate his drunken persona, thebehavioral enactment of the ideal of natural-ness. In the modern era, however, Gyo-kudo’s fondness for alcohol came to be inter-preted as paradigmatic of the unfettered condition of the authentic literatus.36 Somerecent commentators have added to thisview an additional diagnostic register byascribing psychobiographical symptoms tohis intemperance: according to this under-standing, Gyokudo’s “alcoholic indulgence”was “incurred by his resignation, perhaps,but also related to other besetting prob-lems that caused him discouragement andanguish,” such as his later disaffection withhis domainal lord and the death of his wifein 1792 and daughter in 1795.37 In this view,Gyokudo’s autonomy came to be shadowedby an escapist urge, his bacchanalianismrediagnosed as alcoholism. Whether the sub-ject is his painting or his personality,Gyokudo’s modern historiography has beenso conditioned by his reputation for inebri-ety that it has overlooked an obvious firstline of interrogation: a clearheaded exami-nation of Gyokudo’s wine and ink. Untilnow this relationship has been taken at facevalue. At the level of visual analysis, thesketchiness and abbreviation of Gyokudo’sbrushwork has been understood as a trace ormanifestation of his tipsiness, instead of asan analogy.

We should be wary, however, of reading toomuch into accounts of Gyokudo’s bibu-lousness, or of understanding his facture asthe consequence of an alcohol-induced motorincoordination. The primary reason for suchskepticism stems from the prevalence ofthe trope of the drunken painter in EastAsia, which in the Chinese context datesback to as early as the ninth century but isborrowed from the much earlier trope of theintoxicated poet. The sage-philosophers Con-fucius and Zhuangzi offered two importantmodels for the enjoyment of wine. The for-mer is recorded in the Analects as assertingthat although there are no limits on the con-sumption of wine, it should not be indulged

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to the point where one loses control. Theprinciple reflected here is that there is noabsolute template for social behavior, butthat ideally one should adjust one’s actionsto suit the occasion, taking care never totilt into excess.38

The Zhuangzi, however, proved to be evenmore influential in its championing of“wholeness from wine” as a master meta-phor for spontaneity of mind, harmony withthe Way, and the condition of the enlightenedman.39 This idea provided the philosophicalfoundation for a long-standing cultural tra-dition in which intoxication was viewed as a primary characteristic of the Daoistsage, as well as the best catalyst for thosehoping to approximate or achieve sagehood.40

Accordingly, many poets reddened theirvoices just enough to gain a measure ofexhilaration, along the way shifting the con-text of ingestion to the realm of reclusion.Celebrated recluses such as Ruan Ji (210–263),Ji Kang (223–262), and other members of the“Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” wereexemplary of a counterculture ideal thatinspired the flushed approach to versificationpracticed by poets such as Tao Qian (365–427).41 The protagonist of Tao’s poetry wasoften a farmer-scholar or mountain hermitwho experienced sweet drunkenness in soli-tude, as witnessed in his celebrated “Drink-ing Wine” poems.42 The intoxication thereinreflected a philosophical outlook empha-sizing a release from mundane preoccupa-tions and a concomitant privileging of thecarefree man and the here-and-now. Duringthe Tang period, poets such as Du Fu (712–770) and Li Bai (701–762) followed in this disposition but with even less restraint totheir topery, their poetic metabolisms con-sistently stimulated by “the long ecstasy of wine” and their works defining the more inspired pole of a Chinese poetics ofintoxication that would last well over a millennium.

It was under the sway of this traditionthat descriptions of calligraphers creatingunder the influence first began to appear.Most often these accounts were linked topractitioners of “wild-cursive” (kuang cao)calligraphy, in which characters were brushedin a highly cursive and barely legible man-ner, incorporating radical disparities in scale

and abbreviations of form. Early calligra-phers associated with this mode, such asZhang Xu (675–759) and Huaisu (c. 735–c. 800), attempted to convey through it aneffect of eccentricity and expressiveness.The impression made by their calligraphycorresponded well with their portrayals in contemporary and slightly later texts.Zhang Xu, for example, was included amongthe “Eight Drunken Immortals” versifiedby Du Fu:

In Zhang Xu, three cups summon forth theCursive Script Sage:

He strips off his cap and bares his head beforeprinces and lords,

Wielding his brush over the paper like cloudsand mist.43

Another description of Zhang Xu, in Li Zhao’sninth-century Tang guo shi bu (Supplementto the history of the Tang dynasty), was latercanonized as emblematic of his method: “Xuwould drink wine and then execute his cur-sive script, wielding the brush and shout-ing, or dip his head into the ink and writewith it, so that the whole world referred tohim as Crazy Zhang. After he had sobered up,he would look at what he had done. He pro-nounced it demonic and prodigious, and hewas never able to reproduce it.”44

Implicit in such accounts was the beliefthat alcohol could transform an individualinto a medium through which the cosmicforces of creation could be embodied. AsPeter Sturman has noted, however, the wild-cursive tradition represented a contradic-tion between the ideals of an alcohol-inducederasure of subjectivity and the boldly ener-getic appearance of the writing itself.45

In other words, the highs and lows of wild-cursive calligraphy were disjunctive withthe calm and equanimity of the selflessnessthat was understood to be brought on bythe intake of spirits.46

A similar paradox informs the trope ofthe drunken painter, which emerged fromanecdotes about Zhang Xu’s calligraphic performances. A memorable entry concern-ing the Chinese painter Wang Mo (“InkWang”) is found in Zhu Jingxuan’s Tangchaominghua lu (Celebrated painters of the Tangdynasty), a compilation of painters’ biogra-phies from the ninth century:

Whenever he wanted to paint a picture, WangMo would first drink wine, and when he wassufficiently drunk, would splash the ink onto the painting surface. Then, laughing andsinging all the while, he would stamp on itwith his feet and smear it with his hands,besides swashing and sweeping it with thebrush. The ink would be thin in some places,rich in others; he would follow the shapeswhich brush and ink had produced, makingthese into mountains, rocks, clouds and mists,wash in wind and rain, with the suddenness of Creation. It was exactly like the cunning of a deity; when one examined the paintingafter it was finished he could see no traces ofthe puddles of ink.47

Another account of Wang Mo describeshim using his hair to spread ink much in themanner of Zhang Xu. Given these similari-ties with corresponding descriptions of wild-cursive practitioners, it is reasonable toassume that they are at least partially con-structed, conjured up because they werebelieved to resonate with the splashed-inkforms and performative persona associatedwith Wang Mo.48 Although neither Wang Monor calligraphers in the mold of Zhang Xuwere favored by later influential literati suchas Su Shi (1037–1101) and Huang Tingjian(1045–1105), their intense focus on natural-ness of expression ensured that alcohol continued to play a significant role in the dis-course on transparency and self-effacementin the brush arts.49 Thus the rhetoric of the intoxicated brush remained in the arse-nal of later literati painters, especially thosewhose work was characterized by loose brusheffects. Xu Wei (1521–1593), for example,who practiced a “boneless” (contourless)mode of painting based on a planar and laissez-faire use of ink, embraced indul-gence in spirits as a central part of his self-presentation. Accordingly, he was often asso-ciated with the splashed-ink tradition thatreached back to Wang Mo, and he viewedhimself as a follower of Zhang Xu, occa-sionally employing the seal-name Kuang Mo(Crazy Ink) and using colophons to his ownworks to narrate their origins in drunkenrevelry.50

The considerable commentarial literatureon Gyokudo has underemphasized the extentto which he and members of his circle were

aware of this long tradition of rhetorical rev-elry in both Chinese painting and poetry. Inthe Japanese context it was already deeplyingrained in the Five Mountains (Gozan) com-munities of Zen Buddhist monks in medi-eval Kyoto, who were well versed in conti-nental art criticism and frequently inscribedor commented on ink paintings in the formof poetry. One of the best-known works bythe fifteenth-century monk-painter SesshuToyo, Splashed-Ink Landscape (Haboku san-sui zu) (1495) (fig. 3), is accompanied by apoetic encomium by the monk Getto Shukyo(d. 1500) that declares that “the intoxicatedink within one’s heart is the most outstand-ing.” Another monk and scribe, Shoju Ryuto(1429–1498), adds, “Limitless is the joy oflandscapes that emanate from the tips ofinebriated brushes,” indicating the degree towhich knowledgeable commentators at thistime were cognizant of the proper descriptiveprotocols for open-ended brushwork.51

By Gyokudo’s own time, the idea thatwine enabled the transcendence of artisticconvention, along with an awareness of thegenealogy of artists who practiced it, waswidely shared among the literati community.In his treatise Kaiji higen (Humble words on painting), published 1800, the painterKuwayama Gyokushu (1746–1799) describedthe manner in which his contemporariesused a straw or reed brush (warafude) inorder to achieve certain unusual pictorialeffects evocative of Wang Mo.52 Chikuden,meanwhile, also made reference to WangMo in his Sanchujin jozetsu (Prattlings of amountain hermit), contrasting his liberaluse of ink with the sparseness with whichthe painter Li Cheng applied his pigments.53

And the same author invoked Wang Mowhen he stated in the passage previouslycited that “among the Ancients were thosewho borrowed inspiration from wine.” Pas-sages such as these suggest that the exampleof this early Chinese painter was not un-familiar in Japanese literati culture and thathis highly performative suspension of sobri-ety may have provided a specific point of ref-erence for those painters—ranging fromIkeno Taiga to Tachihara Kyosho (1785–1840)—who occasionally indicated on theirscrolls that their works were the result of awine-induced carouse.

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3. Sesshu Toyo, Splashed-InkLandscape (Haboku sansuizu), 1495, vertical hangingscroll, ink on paperTokyo National Museum

4. Urakami Gyokudo, TallMountains and ExpansiveWaters (Sanko suicho zu), c. 1812, vertical hangingscroll, ink and light colors on paperOkayama Prefectural Museum

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No Japanese painter, however, came closeto matching the frequency of Gyokudo’sclaims to tipsification, whether in signatures,seals, painting inscriptions, or poetry. Chiku-den, a close friend of Gyokudo and the mostimportant of his commentators, no doubtplayed a significant role in instilling Gyo-kudo’s circle with an awareness of the pedi-gree of drunken pictorial representation inChinese letters. Shunkin, for instance, fol-lowed Chikuden’s opposition between LiCheng and Wang Mo when he mentionedthe latter and his splashed-ink technique ina colophon to Enkacho (Album of fog andmist).54 Given the frequency with which thelatter is invoked either directly or indirectlyin treatises of the period, it is clear that anawareness of a genealogy of tippler-painterssuffused the environment in which Gyokudo’sown drunkenness became the object of dis-course. Yet the most decisive example ofGyokudo’s consciousness of this traditionlies in the sobriquet Suikyo (Drunkenville)that he used from approximately 1804 untilhis death in 1820. This sobriquet makes spe-cific reference to a prose essay authored by theearly Tang poet Wang Ji (590–644), titledZuixiang ji (The story of Drunkenville).55

Wang Ji is recognized as the Chinese drunkenpoet par excellence, the “tippler-hermit”whose oeuvre is replete with references to theemptying of cups and the sweet stupefactionthat follows. The story describes a Daoist-inspired allegory of a paradisiacal polity whoserulers and citizens are free of desire and haveachieved harmony with the Way. Makingmany specific references to early texts ofphilosophical Daoism, its opening describesthis land as follows:

I don’t know how far it is from Drunkenville tothe Middle Kingdom. Its land is vast and bound-less; there are no hills or steep slopes. The cli-mate there is always calm and stable; the sky is never too gloomy or too bright, and theweather never too cold or hot. The way of lifethere is the Grand Harmony; there are no town-ships or settlements. People there are very free ofdesire, and they lack the emotions of love, hate,joy, and rage. They inhale wind and drink dew and eat none of the five grains. When lying down,they sleep undisturbed; when up, they moveabout unconcerned. They mingle with fish, tur-tles, birds, and beasts; they are ignorant of theuse of boats, carriages, instruments, and tools.56

As Ding Xiang Warner has observed, Drunk-enville “is not a place but a state of mind,”whose citizens “occupy themselves in theaimless naturalness of the animal kingdomrather than in human social institutions,”and whose rulers “govern by paying properrespect to the power of wine.”57

In adopting the title of Wang Ji’s essay asone of his most prominent seal names,Gyokudo signaled his awareness of a power-ful, centuries-long tradition of employingdrunkenness as a metaphor for philosophi-cal ideals, and thereby provided an implicitframework within which his persona andbrushwork were to be received. Accordingly,his paintings can unambiguously be under-stood as highly rhetorical and self-consciousperformances of drunken mark making.From inscriptions on the works it can bedetermined that the audience for these per-formances ranged from anonymous recipi-ents to celebrated members of a growingnationwide community of Japanese literati.The well-known poet-monk Unge (1773–1850), for example, was the recipient in 1812of Tall Mountains and Expansive Waters(Sanko suicho zu) (fig. 4), a work in whichGyokudo added an inscription referring tohimself as a “drunken ogre,” stating that thepainting was executed “in exchange for sakebrought by Unge.” On another occasion, in1805, Gyokudo painted Seeking Inspirationamid Mountains and Rivers (Kozan bekkuzu) for Ota Nanpo (1749–1823), the noted spe-cialist of light satirical fiction, and inscribeda self-referential verse on its surface:

A solitary old man arrives, with no apparentabode of his own,

The sun is already low when he staggers awaydrunkenly singing.

Embracing his zither, he visits the mountainsand waters west of Kyushu58

Again, such inscriptions facilitated a read-ing of Gyokudo’s work as exemplary of negative craftsmanship and of the painterhimself as the paragon of a modus vivendiembodying literati ideals. Intriguingly, how-ever, in Gyokudo’s case the fashioning ofthis persona was apparently a group effort,with members of his circle echoing andexpanding on Gyokudo’s own descriptions of his deportment. Unge reciprocated Gyo-kudo’s gift of a painting with a poem titled

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“Gyokudo rojin no sansui o miru” (On view-ing a landscape by Old Man Gyokudo) thatdescribes him as a “drunken zither player”before proceeding to discuss the “pure work-ings” of his “meandering brush.”59 Chiku-den’s various accounts of Gyokudo were solavishly embellished that focusing solely onthose passages that concern his love of spir-its does not do them justice. Indeed, in aprefatory description to the passage quotedearlier that recounted Gyokudo’s morningdrinking habits, Chikuden describes his sub-ject as “white-haired and yet youthful inhis complexion, wearing white clothes asthough trimmed with the down from cranes,”and carrying “the qin on his shoulders withgreat dignity.” Chikuden concludes, “Gaz-ing at him I knew he was not an ordinary per-son.”60 In the hands of Chikuden, Gyokudo’sinspiration from spirits was part of a moregeneral portrayal in which he was cast as aradiant, auratic figure, a kind of Daoistimmortal. Gyokudo himself was thereforeonly one, albeit a primary, voice in this pre-sentation. The accounts by Chikuden, alongwith those of San’yo, Shunkin, and others,clearly demonstrate that this was a case ofpersonation by committee.61

A proper intoxicology of Gyokudo’sartistry, however, cannot end here, with anassessment of his self-presentation as somuch rhetorical posturing. Despite Gyo-kudo’s deployment of a poetics of intoxica-tion, it would be nonsensical to claim thathe never actually partook of wine, and thatinebriation was never incorporated into hisart making in a meaningful way. The focushere on the constructedness of Gyokudo’sdrunken persona is in no way meant toimply total abstention. Far from it; judgingby the nature and specificity of those few sur-viving accounts of his habits of ingestion, itseems reasonable to assume that the appetitefor alcohol consistently described by con-temporaries, especially those in his owncircle, had some basis in reality. This appearsto be the case throughout the history ofrhetorical inebriation: that its greatest par-takers were oftentimes actually partaking,that there was some substance to their abuse.The crucial distinction, however, liesbetween any actual habits of alcoholic con-sumption, which in Gyokudo’s case are

impossible to determine, and the way theyare communicated as a physical and spiritualcondition for artistic production. In therealm of painting, as in calligraphy, althoughthere were general parameters that governedthe rules of drunken facture—loose and rapid(spontaneous) brushwork, an emphasis onrange in liquidity, disregard for conventionsof composition, and so forth—many of itsmost distinguished examples vary widely intheir final appearance. The way in whichGyokudo’s characteristic mode of landscapepainting, executed under the sign of intoxi-cation, signals a suspension of sobrietyrequires a careful reading of his works inrelation to the patterns of literati pictor-ialism from which his later brush habitsemerged.

Contrary to what one might expect from a“drunken ogre,” Gyokudo’s landscapes areoften densely textured compositions thataim to evoke the atmospheric and poeticeffects suggested by their title inscriptions.These works typically depict moments ofseasonal transition suffused with soft mistor rain (see fig. 2), and are either devoid ofhuman presence or inhabited by a solitary fig-ure found crossing a bridge or seated in oneof the fanciful pavilions situated on a moun-tainside; when finally located, these minia-ture figures provide a sense of scale for theentire scene. Although the landscapes areusually monochrome, occasional touchesof red and yellow are employed to depictautumn foliage, the color pigments floatingon the surface as if on a scrim (fig. 5). Thesmaller works follow a basic “hills beyonda river” composition in which the landmasses are grouped all across the foregroundand background, separated by a flat plain orbody of water (fig. 6). The larger works oftenreveal a lack of surety, a precarious piling onof forms that results in a top-heavy mastermountain. Certain motifs are manicallyrepeated or exaggerated within Gyokudo’slandscapes, such as the flat hilltop clearing,which is often abstracted into curious cir-cular areas of untouched white paper (see fig.4). The most common feature of his work,however, is its shimmering, kinetic qual-ity, introduced by the overlay of dry, short,horizontal strokes that characteristically

5. Urakami Gyokudo,Mountains Dyed Scarlet(Sanko osen zu), detail,c. 1815–1820, verticalhanging scroll, ink and lightcolors on paperPrivate collection

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angle slightly upward to the right on dilutedplanes of lighter ink. This characteristiceffect, as if the landscape is perpetually in astate of settling into view, results fromGyokudo’s highly self-conscious and ambiva-lent relationship to conventional modes ofliterati pictorial representation, which herelied on and discursively negated at thesame time.

Early in his career, Gyokudo took as hispoint of departure one of the most standardmodels for brushwork in the literati canon,

the “Mi dot,” a short horizontal brushstrokeassociated with the early Chinese literatusMi Fu (1051–1107). It is formed by laying thethickest part of the brush sideways on thepaper and pressing slowly, as if applying athumbprint. This technique was employedto build up mountainous forms in one ofGyokudo’s earliest surviving works, South-ern Mountains (Nanzan jukan), a horizontalhandscroll dated to 1787 (fig. 7).62 The sub-sequent development of Gyokudo’s brush-work can be understood as a slow meditation

7. Urakami Gyokudo,Southern Mountains(Nanzan jukan), detail, 1787,horizontal handscroll, inkand light colors on paperPrivate collection, Japan

6. Urakami Gyokudo, Old Trees in LonelySpringtime (Roju shushunzu), c. 1815–1820, verticalhanging scroll, ink on paperDr. and Mrs. Robert FeinbergCollection

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on and elaboration of the Mi dot into a moredynamic and malleable unit with which tomediate his landscapes. In later works heincludes a layering of drier, darker Mi dotsover moister, lighter ones, varying theirlength and combining them with other typesof dots and slashes to form a textural skin forthe scene at hand. Although Gyokudo’sbrushwork is thus rooted in traditionalliterati technique, it quickly departs fromsuch norms, reflecting his anxiety about aclose relationship to convention that is man-ifest in his few recorded views concerning hisown craft. A poem published as part of ananthology to mark his retirement fromdomainal administrative duties, for example,declares:

I am too lazy and obstinate to paint smallscenes;

I can wet the black ink and grind the red, butideas are difficult.

Why busy myself to death with my small talents?

Better to discard the brush and face the truemountains.63

In Mizukara Gyokudo no kabe ni shirusu(Gyokudo’s wall writing), the autobiograph-ical text mentioned above, Gyokudo states:“I paint without knowledge of the ancientSix Laws; it is all done at random and Idetest being a ‘painter.’” The Six Laws ofPainting of which he professes ignoranceare the classical foundation of all East Asianpainting technique, formulated by Xie He in the mid-sixth century.64 Although theclaim to methodlessness was by this time a common refrain among East Asian liter-ati painters, its presence in Gyokudo’s text should not be dismissed lightly, for itprovides an unambiguous articulation of his pursuit of negative facture, along with a context in which to assess the role of inebrious inspiration.

In this regard, Chikuden’s eyewitnessaccount of Gyokudo’s approach to painting,recorded in Sanchujin jozetsu (Prattlings ofa mountain hermit) and cited earlier, meritsclose attention. Chikuden describes an un-expected process whereby Gyokudomethod-ically creates under the influence: “Gyokudowould first begin to enter into the appropri-ate spirit when drinking, and once he low-ered his brush to paper it would not stay

still. When the inspiration lessened he woulddesist. In such a manner, for a single scrollhe would sometimes repeat the cycle morethan ten times.”

Although this passage should be viewedwith some skepticism, it nevertheless pro-vides a description of Gyokudo’s actual prac-tice. What differentiates it most dramaticallyfrom accounts of Zhang Xu and Wang Mo atwork is the cyclical nature of Gyokudo’sengagement with wine. Chikuden describesa peculiar process whereby Gyokudo wouldimbibe alcohol and then wait for its effectsto take hold before taking up his brush, thenproceed to paint until the high wore off,repeating the process ten or more times inorder to complete a painting.65 This processis less one of unbridled spontaneity than ofpremeditated insobriety, a somewhat forcedmanner of inducing the proper state ofheightened sensitivity or liberated aware-ness with which to execute a literati paint-ing. Gyokudo appears to be embodying therhetorical trope of the drunken painter,earnestly performing the role of the untram-meled artist. He is here practicing a form ofmethod acting.

More significantly, Chikuden’s accountspells out a dialectic of sobriety and inebri-ation that corresponds to the dialogic rela-tionship between exquisite craft and clumsi-ness in much of Gyokudo’s output. Themost impressive manifestation of this rela-tionship is Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow(Toun shisetsu zu) (see fig. 1), a landscapescroll whose signature states that it waspainted by the artist in a state of intoxication.Commonly dated to around 1811/1812, whenGyokudo settled in Kyoto and was enteringthe final decade of his life, this is widelyconsidered to be the most remarkable workin a remarkable oeuvre.66 This large andintricately structured scroll, depicting asnowy mountainside at dawn, resembles apictorial negative of Gyokudo’s other land-scapes. Tall trees in the lower foreground,perched on two landmasses connected by abridge, establish the upward trajectory ofnumerous snow-capped mountain forms andareas shrouded in powdery mist, the latterdepicted with a soft, highly diluted graywash. The mountainscape is punctuatedwith areas of dark wash that surround archi-tectural forms, such as a pair of rooftops

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8. Urakami Gyokudo, Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow(Toun shisetsu zu), detail, c. 1811–1812, verticalhanging scroll, ink and lightcolors on paperKawabata Foundation, KanagawaPrefecture

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and a pagoda in the middle left. Much ofthe surface is covered with Gyokudo’s trade-mark horizontal and right- and upward-lean-ing strokes, in this case thickly and moistlyapplied. Remarkably, however, these strokesare also employed to fill in the dark, bruisedsky, especially around the main snow-cov-ered peak at the top, transforming the voidor negative space around the snow-cappedmountain into its textural echo. In addition,the surface is selectively defined by the spi-dery, lacelike branch systems of mostly leaf-less trees, while spattered red pigment isused to depict what appears to be the remainsof autumn foliage and possibly intimationsof emerging sunlight at dawn. The overalleffect is one of a brooding, dramatic, hoaryyet somehow vibrant snowscape. The sub-ject matter is unclear; the significance ofEastern Clouds, Sifted Snow centers on theinterpretation of its title, inscribed to the leftof its main mountain peak. Although thetitle could be understood as descriptive of aspecific atmospheric condition, one theoryproposes that it makes reference to an eroticChinese legend about a mountain goddess.67

Whatever the resonances of its title, East-ern Clouds, Sifted Snow represents a care-fully constructed snowscape in whichpatches of unpainted surface are reservedand set off by their inked surroundings. Lay-ers of wash, horizontal texture strokes, andshadowy, filigreed tree branches form auniquely textured membrane over the entirescroll. The distribution of motifs and formsis judicious, while the calibration of grada-tion, liquidity, and saturation is measured.Locally, however, individual brushstrokescan appear slapdash, as in the graffiti-like,crosshatched trees of the middle portion ofthe scroll (fig. 8). The burnished, darklyinked patches around the architectural formsconsist of frenetically applied brushwork,while the red dots of autumn foliage areflung across the surface, spattering wellbeyond the vicinity of the trees they weremeant to adorn. Such free play at the locallevel is effective only because of the order-liness of the entire pictorial structure. Thelooseness of microfacture here is enabledby the composure of composition and tonaldistribution. In this sense, Eastern Clouds,Sifted Snow serves as an embodiment ofGyokudo’s method of syncopated painting

and drinking, as described by Chikuden: itsbrushwork is only locally and occasionallyintoxicated.Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow represents

the most accomplished expression of a pic-torial persona that Gyokudo struggled todevelop and inhabited uneasily during the lastdecade of his life. Its ability to hold up to char-acterological analysis is based on the notionthat traces and patterns of nonintention aremost legible as such when played out withina highly conventional field of representa-tion. This strategy of embedding expres-sions of exhilarated brush dynamics withinreceived structures of literati picture making—including compositional templates, pro-tocols of brushwork, and iconographies ofvirtue—places in high relief the representa-tional role of any putative intoxicants, andwas explored by Gyokudo with more andmore frequency from 1811–1812 onward.

In his late works, however, the scale of thevisual field was drastically diminished: incontrast to the expansive, vertically oriented

surface of Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow,Gyokudo increasingly preferred small rec-tangular and roundel formats. The small,squarish frame of Clouds and MountainsDimly Discerned (Unzan moko zu) (fig. 9),for example, measures only some thirty centimeters on a side, greatly condensingthe pictorial qualities that characterizedearlier scrolls. In this work, the conceit ofstupefied artistry—the “Drunkenville” sealis impressed here as well—mediates theentire image, blurring motifs into semi-indistinguishability. As the title indicates,clouds and mountains appear to fuse into one another, achieving an ideal pictorialexpression of the cosmic forces that gener-ate natural phenomena. Yet the paintingmaintains a crucial, if threadbare, legibility

9. Urakami Gyokudo, Cloudsand Mountains DimlyDiscerned (Unzan moko zu),c. 1815–1820, verticalhanging scroll, ink on paperPrivate collection, Japan

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as a landscape, acknowledging the limits of any utopian pursuit of naturalness andskill-lessness.

Gyokudo did not always observe theselimits, as Chikuden notes: “When he becametoo drunk, however, his brushwork devolved,and his buildings, trees, and rocks wouldbecome undistinguishable.” As Clouds andMountains Dimly Discerned appears todemonstrate, then, it was only when a cer-tain measure of detoxication was main-tained that the trope of the drunken painterwas most successfully activated. The dif-ference between an undistinguishable andundistinguished painting was located in itsability to intimate a transcendence of sub-jectivity, or to preview a condition of art-lessness, while still moored in a mundanestate of selfhood.

Gyokudo’s actuation of the tradition ofthe drunken painter ultimately providesinsight into the nature of literati pictorialism,predicated as it was on a fundamental con-tradiction: In order to make literati ideals pictorially legible to the appropriate com-munities, one had to have “skills”; but theseskills betrayed the very ideals they weremobilized to convey. The most ambitiousprojections of literati identity recognizedthe artistic fecundity of this dilemma. Anda wide array of solutions, of which Gyokudo’swas one inimitable example, were arrived atover the centuries to give expression to thisstate of negative facture. In this sense, literatipainting can be understood as aspiring to acraft of perpetual self-erasure, in which theforegrounding of the process of auto-efface-ment itself became the precondition andfocus of viewer empathy. And, ideally, ittriggered a recognition on the part of thebeholder that the painting was participatingin a project that was shared, and bound forfailure, but that the painter would try and tryagain.

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NOTES

1. Although employed throughout this essay as amatter of convenience, the term literati painting,derived from the Chinese term wenren, whichbecame widely used only during the Ming period(1368–1644), may not be the most appropriate todescribe a body of work that, in its various incarna-tions, has also been referred to as the painting ofscholar-amateurs or scholar-officials (Chineseshidafu), or as is common in Japan, “Southern School painting” (Nanga). The terms idealist paint-ing and gentlemanly painting have also been used. In the Japanese scholarly community, debate contin-ues over what to call this general category of works.For key arguments in this debate, see Kono Motoaki,“Nihon bunjinga shiron” (An essay on Japaneseliterati painting), Kokka 1207 (1996): 5–13.

2. See, for example, Aida-Yuen Wong, “A New Lifefor Literati Painting in the Early Twentieth Century:Eastern Art and Modernity, a Transcultural Narra-tive?” Artibus Asiae 60, no. 2 (2000): 297–326.

3. Such studies are too numerous to list here, buttwo book-length publications worthy of special men-tion are Chu-tsing Li et al., eds., Artists and Patrons:Some Social and Economic Aspects of ChinesePainting (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), and James Cahill,The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived andWorked in Traditional China (New York, 1994).

4. This point is made in the introductory chapter ofCraig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of WenZhengming (Honolulu, 2004).

5. Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity inEarly Qing China (Cambridge, 2001).

6. Clunas 2004.

7. Gyokudo’s surname has traditionally been pho-neticized as Uragami in English, thus applying avoiced consonant mark to the third phoneme. Pre-modern Japanese surnames, however, rarely includedsuch diacritical changes, and at least one descendantof Gyokudo’s family in the twentieth century hasinsisted that Urakami is the proper pronunciation.For a brief discussion, see the unpaginated preface by Nakamura Akira in Ryukawa Kiyoshi, UrakamiGyokudo—hito to geijutsu (Urakami Gyokudo: Theman and his art) (Tokyo, 1976).

8. Cited in John M. Rosenfield, Mynah Birds andFlying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of YosaBuson (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 9.

9. Robert L. Thorpe and Richard Ellis Vinograd, eds.,Chinese Art and Culture (New York, 2001), 325.

10. Hay 2001, 272–277.

11. On the comparative receptions of father and sonsee Taketani Chojiro, Bunjin garon—UrakamiShunkin ‘Rongashi’ hyoshaku (Literati paintingtheory: An annotated translation of UrakamiShunkin’s Rongashi) (Tokyo, 1988), 24–27. In later

Edo-period painting treatises, such as Gajo yoryaku(Abbreviated essentials of the vehicle of painting,1833), it was not uncommon for Gyokudo to bedenied his own biographical entry and instead givenbrief mention in an entry devoted to Shunkin.

12. Stephen Addiss, Tall Mountains and FlowingWaters: The Arts of Uragami Gyokudo (Honolulu,1987), 17. One of these transcriptions appears as thepreface to Gyokudo’s Kokin yoji cho (Album ofleisurely playing the zither, 1817), which Tessaiappears to have owned; he inscribes the title label,box, preface, and colophon. See Kono Motoaki, ed.,Gyokudo, Chikuden, Beisanjin, vol. 2 of Edomeisaku gacho zenshu (Compendium of famous Edo painting albums) (Tokyo, 1993), 24.

13. Hashimoto Kansetsu, Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo,1926); Yano Kyoson, Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo, 1926).

14. See Ohara Magosaburo, ed., Uragami Gyokudogafu (Paintings by Urakami Gyokudo) (KurashikiCity, 1933). Although known primarily as a collectorof Western oil painting, Ohara Magosaburo had aninterest in Gyokudo that stemmed from the factsthat Magosaburo also hailed from Okayama, and thathis maternal great-grandfather was a friend of thepainter. On Magosaburo, see Tanaka Hisayo, Bijutsu-hin no idoshi—Kindai Nihon no korekutaa-tachi(The history of the movement of art objects: Collec-tors of modern Japan) (Tokyo, 1981), 224–259; Buri-jisuton Bijutsukan, ed., Seiyo bijutsu ni miseraretajugonin no korekutaa 1890–1940 / Captivated byWestern Art: Fifteen Japanese Art Collectors1890–1940 [exh. cat., Bridgestone Museum of Art](Tokyo, 1997), 19–22.

15. Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan (Tokyo,1937).

16. See, for example, Yoshikawa’s “Gyokudo kinshi”(Gyokudo the qin player, 1934), in Yoshikawa Eijizenshu (The complete works of Yoshikawa Eiji)(Tokyo, 1970), 45:114. The relationship of Kawabata’sliterature to Gyokudo is explored in Hatori Tetsuya,“Urakami Gyokudo to Kawabata Yasunari—‘Koto woidaite,’ ‘Tenju no ko,’ ‘Itsumo hanasu hito,’ Showanijukyunen no tenki,” “Urakami Gyokudo andKawabata Yasunari: The turning point of 1954 and‘Embracing the zither,’ ‘Heaven-bestowed child,’ and‘The person always talked about,’” Seikei daigakubungakubu kiyo (Journal of the literature depart-ment of Seikei University) 38 (2003): 1–33.

17. Early postwar research on Gyokudo was galva-nized by a major exhibition on the artist in 1954 andculminated in a special issue of the journal Kobijutsu(Antique art), vol. 30 (1970), devoted to his life andwork.

18. See Sugimoto Yoshihisa, “Urakami Gyokudo nosansuiga to sakuga seishin” (Urakami Gyokudo’slandscapes and approach to painting), Kobunkakenkyu (Studies in antique culture) 4 (2005): 31–96.

19. Tamada was a disciple of Miyake Shosai(1662–1741), who in turn studied with the famousscholar Yamazaki Ansai (1618–1682). Tamada’s ideashave much in common with thinkers associatedwith the Kaitokudo Merchant Academy in Osaka;see Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in TokugawaJapan: The Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka(Chicago, 1987).

Tamada’s practical learning also came to be closelyassociated with the Tatsuno domain (HarimaProvince, present-day Hyogo Prefecture) from wherehe hailed, and Tatsuno scholars formed one impor-tant fraternal community for Gyokudo in Edo. Sugi-moto’s discovery of numerous references to him inthe diary of one such scholar, Matano Gyokusen(1730–1806), demonstrates the degree to whichGyokudo’s cultural formation was indebted to themembers of this network, which also included theinfluential Edo literati painters Kitayama Kangan(1767–1801) and Nakayama Koyo (1717–1780). SeeSugimoto 2005, 37–40.

20. These other scholars included Ouchi Ranshitsuand Udono Shinei. Kokyu authored the preface forGyokudo kinpu (Gyokudo’s qin music, published in1789 and 1791), which is discussed further below.

21. See Sugimoto 2005, 40–45. Gyokudo’s poeticdevelopment is discussed in Ikezawa Ichiro, Edobunjin ron—Ota Nanpo wo chushin ni (A theory ofEdo literati, with a focus on Ota Nanpo) (Tokyo,2000), 40–82 and 382–405.

22. Wang Yangming (1472–1529) was a Ming dynasty scholar who espoused an idealist form ofneo-Confucian teaching popularized in Japan byKumazawa Banzan (1619–1691) and other scholars inthe seventeenth century. Oyomei philosophy wasviewed by the Tokugawa shogunate as a radical andsubversive alternative to the officially embraced ZhuXi brand of neo-Confucianism and thus was periodi-cally suppressed. For a good introduction to Banzanand Oyomei thought in Japan, see James McMullen,Idealism, Protest, and the Tale of Genji: The Confu-cianism of Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691) (Oxford,1999).

On the National Learning movement, see Harry H.Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourseand Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago, 1988),and Susan L. Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugakuand the Imagining of Community in Early ModernJapan (Durham, N.C., 2003). As Suzuki Susumu haspointed out, however, Gyokudo’s interest with bothWang Yangming philosophy and the National Learn-ing movement was concurrently developed throughhis close contact with members of his home domain,especially the Komoto family of merchants. SeeSuzuki, Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo, 1978), 19.

23. The most important studies of Gyokudo’s musicto date are by Stephen Addiss. See “UragamiGyokudo: The Complete Literati Artist” (PhD diss.,University of Michigan, 1977); “Gyokudo noongaku” (The music of Gyokudo), in Sasaki Johei,ed., Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo, 1980), 90–96; and

Addiss 1987. Also useful are recent studies that pro-vide a fuller picture of qin culture during the Edoperiod. See the various articles found in Gyokudo toShunkin, Shukin: Uragami Gyokudo fushi no geijutsu (Gyokudo, Shunkin, and Shukin: The art of Urakami Gyokudo and his sons) [exh. cat.,Fukushima Prefectural Museum] (Aizu Wakamatsu,1994), especially Kishibe Shigeo, “Urakami Gyokudoto shigenkin” (Urakami Gyokudo and the seven-stringed zither), 107–116; Sakata Shin’ichi,“Gyokudo no kinpu” (Gyokudo’s zither manuals),124–137; and Kaketa Hironori, “Aizu ni okeruUrakami Gyokudo fushi no geino saiko” (A reconsid-eration of the artistic activities of Urakami Gyokudoand his son in Aizu), 138–142.

24. Gyokudo’s medical instruments are illustrated inTakeda Koichi, Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo, 1993), 7.

25. On saibara, see Elizabeth J. Markham, Saibara: Japanese Court Songs of the Heian Period(Cambridge, 1983).

26. See Addiss 1987, 29–48, and Kishibe Shigeo, Edojidai no kinshi monogatari (Zither masters of theEdo period) (Tokyo, 2000).

27. See Sugimoto 2005, 72–88.

28. This manner of signing his work already appearson one of Gyokudo’s earliest known paintings, datedto 1786.

29. Gyokudo kinshi shu (Collection of Gyokudo theqin player) (Takamatsu, 1794) contains sixty-oneChinese-style poems and includes a preface by Minagawa Kien (1734–1807). A second anthology,Gyokudo kinshi koshu (Later collection of Gyokudothe qin player), published in 1797, contains seventy-eight poems.

30. Translation by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987,56, with minor adjustments. The first words, “totallydrunk,” were replaced here with “tipsy” as a moreappropriate translation of the Japanese issui, whichconnotes a momentary state of stimulation.

31. Translation by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987, 17.

32. Although published posthumously in 1836, thistext bears a preface dated to 1813 in which Chikudenwrites that the work had already been completedmore than ten years earlier, when he was in his mid-twenties. For the most reliable published edition, seeTakahashi Hiromi, ed., Sanchujin jozetsu, Jiga daigo,Chikudenso shiyu garoku (Prattlings of a mountainhermit, collected painting inscriptions, and Old ManChikuden’s record of painting by teachers andfriends), vol. 7 of Teihon Nihon kaigaron taisei (Stan-dard editions of Japanese painting theory) (Tokyo,1996), 7–47. See also Taketani Chojiro, Chikudengaron Sanchujin jozetsu yakkai (Children’s paintingtheory: An annotated translation of Prattlings of amountain hermit) (Tokyo, 1990).

33. Translation in by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987, 22.

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34. Translation adapted from Addiss 1987, 21–22.This text bears a preface dated 1810 (Bunka 7), 11.27,and was published the following year, while Chiku-den was at Jimyo-in temple in Osaka.

35. Translation by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987, 28.

36. Here almost the entirety of the Gyokudo litera-ture could be cited. See in particular Ryukawa 1976,351–357, and Kono Motoaki, “Gyokudo to sake”(Gyokudo and alcohol), in Kono 1993, 148–155.

37. See Yoshiho Yonezawa and Chu Yoshizawa,Japanese Painting in the Literati Style, trans. BettyIverson Monroe (New York, 1974), 91. Similar specu-lation is found in Ryukawa 1976.

38. See the discussion in Maeno, “Chugoku no shijinto sake” (Chinese poets and alcohol), in Sake (Alco-hol), ed. Hayashi Kentaro (Tokyo, 1976), 160.

39. See the passages on drunkenness in Zhuangzi,2/19/674, and A. C. Graham, trans., Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London, 1981), 137.These passages are cited along with a general discus-sion in Ding Xiang Warner, “Mr. Five Dippers ofDrunkenville: The Representation of Enlightenmentin Wang Ji’s Drinking Poems,” Journal of the Ameri-can Oriental Society 118, no. 3 (July–September1998): 351.

40. For a sociological account of the theme of drunk-enness in Chinese poetry, see Julia Lee, “Alcohol inChinese Poems: References to Drunkenness, Flush-ing, and Drinking,” Contemporary Drug Problems13 (Summer 1986): 303–338.

41. On the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, seeAudrey Spiro, Contemplating the Ancients (Berkeley,1991). A discussion of their importance to the laterideal of the scholar-drunkard is found in WolfgangBauer, China and the Search for Happiness, trans.Michael Shaw (New York, 1976), 150–151.

42. See James Hightower, “T’ao Ch’ien’s ‘DrinkingWine’ Poems,” in Wen-lin: Studies in the ChineseHumanities, ed. Chow Tse-tsung (Madison, Wis.,1968), 3–44; James Hightower, The Poetry of T’aoCh’ien (Oxford, 1970).

43. Translation by Amy McNair in The UprightBrush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song LiteratiPolitics (Honolulu, 1998), 22. For a discussion ofZhang Xu, see McNair 1998, 21–26.

44. Translation by Amy McNair in McNair 1998, 22.Eugene Wang has shared with me his observationthat such drunken performances can be traced backto certain traditions of popular street performancefrom the Han dynasty.

45. See Peter C. Sturman, “Wine and Cursive: TheLimits of Individualism in Northern Sung China,” in Cary Y. Liu et al., eds., Character and Context inChinese Calligraphy (Princeton, 1999), 200–231.

46. Sturman 1999, 216–219.

47. Translation by Alexander Soper in “T’ang ch’aoming hua lu: Celebrated Painters of the T’angDynasty by Chu Ching-hsuan of T’ang,” ArtibusAsiae 31 (1958): 204–230. See also Shimada Shujiro,“Concerning the I-p’in Style of Painting,” trans.James Cahill, parts 1–3, Oriental Art 7, no. 2 (1961):66–72; 8, no. 3 (1962): 130–137; 10, no. 1 (1964):19–26. Originally published as “Ippin gafu ni tsuite,”Bijutsu kenkyu (Journal of art studies) 161 (1950):264–290.

48. The earliest extant examples of the splashed-inklandscape tradition that many scholars trace back toWang Mo do not appear until the late thirteenth cen-tury, in four works in Japanese collections attributedto the Chinese monk-painter Yujian. They are dis-cussed in Yukio Lippit, “Of Modes and Manners inMedieval Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshu’s SplashedInk Landscape of 1495,” unpublished paper.

49. Sturman maps out the differing and complexways in which scholar-officials of the Northern Song period (960–1127) assessed Zhang Xu’s calligra-phy and the role of wine in his writing. See Sturman1999.

50. See, for example, Xu Wei’s colophon to his Scrollof Flowering Plants and Miscellaneous Subjects,painted for his nephew in 1591. This inscription andother aspects of Xu Wei’s drunken persona are dis-cussed in Nishigami Minoru, “Hatsuboku kaki zu notanjo—Jo’i to Min koki no Sekko bunjin gadan” (Thebirth of splashed-ink flowers-and-grasses paintings:Xu Wei and painting in the Zhejiang region duringthe late Ming period), in Mindai kaiga to Sesshu(Sesshu and Ming painting) [exh. cat., Nezu Instituteof Fine Arts] (Tokyo, 2005), 25–29. See also KathleenRyor, “Bright Pearls Hanging in the Marketplace:Self-Expression and Commodification in the Paintingof Xu Wei” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, NewYork University, 1998).

51. Lippit (unpublished). The inscriptions onSplashed-Ink Landscape are transcribed and dis-cussed by Hoshiyama Shin’ya in Iriya Yoshitaka andShimada Shujiro, eds., Zenrin gasan—chusei sui-bokuga wo yomu (Painting inscriptions of the Zenforest: Reading medieval ink painting) (Tokyo, 1987),205–210.

52. See Sakazaki Shizuka, Nihon kaigaron taikei(Compendium of Japanese painting theory) (Tokyo:1980), 1: 148. This passage is mentioned in SatoYasuhiro, ed., Urakami Gyokudo (Tokyo, 1997), 82; I am indebted to Sato’s discussion of the splashed-inktradition (81–85).

53. For a translation of this passage, see Hugh Wylie,“Nanga Painting Treatises of Nineteenth-CenturyJapan: Translations, Commentary, and Analysis”(PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1991), 130; see alsoSato 1997, 82.

54. See Kono 1993, 163.

55. The sobriquet has been translated as “DrunkenRustic” by Addiss, but “Story of Drunkenville”acknowledges the allusion to Wang Ji. Its translationis taken from Warner 1998.

56. Translation by Ding Xiang Warner in Warner1988, 353.

57. Warner 1988, 353. It is also likely that the title of Gyokudo’s autobiographical essay, translated as“Gyokudo’s Wall Writing,” is modeled after Wang Ji’sset of eight poems whose title translates as “Scrib-bled on a Tavern Wall.”

58. See the discussion of this painting in SatoYasuhiro, “Un’u no jokei—Urakami Gyokudo noerochishizumu—” (The spectacle of clouds and rain:Urakami Gyokudo’s eroticism), Museum 491 (1992):27–38. That Gyokudo’s poem for Nanpo is composedof stock elements is suggested by the fact that a sepa-rate poem by Gyokudo, one of three that accompa-nies his painting Regretful Parting amid Mountainsand Rivers (Obetsu kozan zu) (private collection),differs only in its third line. See Sato 1997, 44.

59. See Sato 1997, 32.

60. Translated by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987, 22.The passage is from section 84 of Chikudenso shiyugaroku (Old Man Chikuden’s record of paintings byteachers and friends). It is interesting to observe theassociation between Chikuden’s account andGyokudo’s often-used seal, Hakuzen kinshi (Thewhite-bearded qin player).

61. Itakura Masa’aki discusses a similar phenomenonamong fourteenth-century Chinese literati of theJiangnan region in “Cho’u dai ‘Geisan zo’ (Taipeikokyu hakubutsuin) wo meguru shomondai” (Variousissues related to Portrait of Ni Zan inscribed byZhang Yu [National Palace Museum, Taipei]) Bijut-sushi ronso (Studies in art history) 17 (2001): 159–182.

62. Southern Mountains was painted for one ofGyokudo’s major early patrons in Bizen, KomotoIchia, to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

63. Translation by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987, 98.

64. Translation by Stephen Addiss in Addiss 1987,17. For a discussion of Xie He’s Six Laws, see JohnHay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, I:Hsieh Ho Revisited,” Res: Anthropology and Aes-thetics 6 (Autumn 1983): 72–111; “Values and His-tory in Chinese Painting, II: The HierarchicEvolution of Structure,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7–8 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 103–136.

65. For a discussion of this process see Sato 1997, 38.

66. Numerous commentaries on the work have been authored over the years. A classic analysis byYoshizawa Chu is found in “Urakami Gyokudo hitsuToun shisetsu zu” (Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow, byUrakami Gyokudo), Kokka (Flowers of the nation)706 (1951): 31–37. See also Sato 1997, 36–39, andSugimoto 2005, 46–48.

67. Sato Yasuhiro has raised the possibility that thetitle refers to the legend of Yaoji, the daughter of aminor god in southern China. Having died at an earlyage, Yaoji was buried at Wushan Mountain, whereher spirit continued to reside. One day the king ofChu traveled through the region and campedovernight at the base of the mountain. Yaoji visitedhim in his sleep, and, as she was about to take herleave in the morning, the king asked her where shelived. Yaoji answered that she lived on the peak ofWushan, where they could next meet: in the morn-ing she took the form of clouds, in the evening thatof misty rain. The imagery of “clouds and rain” hassince become an erotic symbol in the Chinese poetictradition. See Sato 1992, in which the author hastraced the subtle infusion of this imagery into anumber of Gyokudo’s paintings, including EasternClouds, Sifted Snow.

The title Eastern Clouds, Sifted Snow is also avariation on the title of a painting in an album by the Chinese painter Li Chubo titled Heavy CloudsAbout to Snow, once owned by Gyokudo, and furtherincludes several homonymic references. The charac-ters for Eastern Clouds can also be understood as“overhanging clouds” or “daybreak” (shinonome). Inaddition, the character for “sifted” or “sieve” can beinterpreted as “pouring,” as in “pouring or servingwine.” This image can refer both to Gyokudo’s fond-ness for wine and to the merrymaking that is imag-ined to have taken place during Yaoji’s evening withthe king of Chu. See Kono 1993, 152; Sato 1997, 36.

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