Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer Maki Kaneko (bio) Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde. By Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer. Brill, 2020. xii, 181 pages. €104.00, cloth; €104.00, E-book. The last two decades have witnessed the significant growth of English-language scholarship on 1950s and 1960s Japanese avant-garde art. Spearheaded by Alexandra Monroe's 1994 landmark exhibition/publication Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, in the early twenty-first century many scholars published must-read books, catalogues, and articles on post-1945 Japanese avant-garde art, including Reiko Tomii, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Midori Yoshimoto, Ming Tiampo, and Miriam Sas. Particularly foregrounding Japanese avant-gardists' active interactions and negotiations with their Euro-American counterparts, their studies have effectively illuminated the central roles played by those "non-Western" artists in the post-1945 contemporary art scene and thereby posed a significant challenge to the Euro-American-centric notion of modernism and avant-gardism. This collection of scholarship thereby sets firm ground for the study of post-1945 Japanese art vis-à-vis the so-called global art history, whose most recent outcome can be found in the 2019 traveling exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, while inspiring young and mid-career scholars to further complicate and diversify the narrative of the postsurrender art of Japan.1 [End Page 426] Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer's first book, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde, is the most recent member of this league of scholarship and fully demonstrates that the study of 1950s and 1960s Japanese art is far from exhausted. The book focuses on the avantgarde calligraphers' collective Bokujinkai, or People of the Ink, which was founded by five young Japanese calligraphers in 1952 and attained significant recognition in Western Europe and the United States through to the 1960s. While the Bokujinkai is not at all an unknown group, previous studies focused almost exclusively on its de facto leader Morita Shiryū (1912–98) and on Inoue Yūichi (1916–85), arguably the most radical member of the group. Bogdanova-Kummer's book is the first study in English to holistically investigate this avant-garde calligraphy group through its membership, network, formal experimentations, and guiding philosophies from its formation to its "conservative turn" in the 1960s. By centrally focusing on the Bokujinkai's strategies, efforts, and struggles for the internationalization of calligraphy with the notion of the "transcultural" advocated by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsche as its key framework, moreover, Bogdanova-Kummer sets the goal for her book to "change the perception of transcultural constellations in postwar abstract art" and further challenges the Eurocentric account of avant-garde art "not only in regard to geographies, but also in terms of the art forms and communities involved" (p. 3). The uniqueness of this study lies in the author's attempt to position calligraphy, "an often overlooked and culturally specific art form" (p. 9), at the center of the early postwar transnational interactions of Japanese and Euro-American avant-garde artists. Oscillating between art and letter, rooted in the Sino-Japanese cultural tradition, and deemed to be conservative, calligraphy was significantly disadvantaged in proving its relevance to Euro-American art at that time. However, the author insists, precisely because of this disadvantageous position or marginalization, the Bokujinkai's "success" in the international art arena invites our scrutiny; its bold strategies toward the challenge of bridging calligraphy and abstractions, and the limitations encountered in doing so, reveal "the complex mechanisms that drive the art world's politics of inclusion and rejection, as well as the conflicting historiographies of the postwar avant-gardes as perceived in Japan, Europe, and the United States" (p. 146). Based on this fascinating proposal, Bogdanova-Kummer details the Bokujinkai's trajectory through six main chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 present, in the author's words, the "macro-level sociopolitical contextualization" (p. 23) and "micro-level study of the community of avant-garde calligraphers" (p. 37), respectively. Together with the [End Page 427] introduction, which includes an extremely important survey of pre-1945 modern Japanese calligraphy, the first two chapters provide the reader with key...