[2] In the early postwar years, however, the five Bokujinkai founders felt that Ueda was too invested in winning conflicts with the calligraphy establishment, and that this myopic focus was preventing necessary international connections and opportunities for Japanese calligraphers.
Kline's paintings, despite being oil on canvas, consisted of bold black strokes on white grounds and appeared strikingly close to Bokujinkai's avant-garde calligraphy.
Critics questioned the influence of calligraphy on Kline's work and vice versa, but it seems that both parties arrived at a similar visual expression around the same time.
[11] Today, the group maintains an active, stratified membership system and is led by calligraphers such as Sōsai Inada, a former student of Morita.
Their manifesto called for the democratization of the highly stratified calligraphic establishment in Japan, and they aspired to create a horizontal power structure within Bokujinkai.
The group believed that international recognition was one way to prove to the calligraphy establishment that it needed to expand, innovate, and modernize in order to maintain its relevance.
[16] Bokujiinkai's early efforts to achieve international connections with postwar European and American artists stemmed in part from a 1948 article written by Morita entitled “Like a Rainbow.” In the article Morita envisioned a metaphorical rainbow where the arc of Japanese calligraphy and the arc of European and American abstract painting could ultimately merge into a bridge spanning the globe.
One of the key ways to achieve this vision, according to Morita, was to encourage an appreciation of calligraphy based primarily on its formal qualities, similar to painting.
[17] Bokujinkai's early global outreach was successful in part because it coincided in the U.S. and Europe with a postwar interest in Japanese art and aesthetics and the practice and philosophy of Zen.
This assertion troubled even experimental calligraphers, who despite their desire to break new ground, were nonetheless traditionally trained and felt that the character and expressing it through brush formed the foundation of calligraphy.
This renewed interest in moji-sei was increasingly reflected in the content of the group's monthly journals, which turned away from discussions of modern abstract art and toward studies of premodern Chinese and Japanese calligraphy.
Morita's general philosophies seem to inform much of the group's identity, specifically his notion that calligraphy is “a space to write characters, where one’s vibrant inner life dances out and is given shape.”[23] Rather than an expansive mission, today's Bokujinkai focuses more on preservation of the avant-garde style it helped create.
These works made use of nontraditional materials such as black enamel on kraft paper brushed with a handmaid broom, and were finished with a clear, glossy coat to give them a smooth, hard surface like that of oil paintings.
Despite the visible motion of the brushstrokes, without reference to a specific character, it is difficult to tell where Inoue started and completed the work, giving the overall image a sense of chaotic, whirling energy.
And unlike traditional calligraphy, the brushstrokes also exit the boundaries of the paper and leave very little negative space, aligning the style more closely with the “all over” method associated with painters such as Claude Monet, Mark Tobey, and Jackson Pollock.
[33] The work simultaneously flips the color scheme of ink-on-paper calligraphy, and calls to mind traditional Japanese screens executed on gold paper.
[34] For calligraphers who create works of a few characters written with an enormous brush, there is significant physical energy involved and the process can be dramatic and dynamic to witness.
Inoue and Morita both allowed studio visits and gave demonstrations that were photographed and distributed widely in both Japanese and foreign press.
[35] Scenes of early Bokujinkai members at work were also captured by the artist Pierre Alechinsky in his 1957 short film, La calligraphie japonaise.
These publications featured a wide variety of material including exhibition reviews, research pieces, critical commentary, visual analysis, and roundtable debates and discussions.
[38] In the early years of Bokujinkai, Bokubi was one of the most important tools in establishing contact with European and American artists and art circles, in part because the large number of calligraphy reproductions meant that non-Japanese speakers could learn about new works even without being able to read the accompanying articles.
Bokujinkai members’ works were also featured at an exhibition at Musée Cernuschi in Paris in 1956, at Documenta in Kassel in 1959, and at the São Paulo Biennial in 1956, 1959, and 1961.
[10] In the 1950s, Bokujinkai works were discussed and reviewed extensively both in and out of Japan, largely due to the group's prominent exhibitions and the circulation of the periodical Bokubi.
Bokujinkai calligraphers were at first readily accepted by the art world in Japan and engaged in frequent dialogue, collaboration, and exhibitions with prominent modern artists.
Some leading figures in the Japanese art world ultimately felt that Bokujinkai was not radical or experimental enough, precisely because they continued to hold on to moji-sei (文字性, essence of the written character).
This belief was expressed by the leader of Gutai, Jirō Yoshihara, as well as by the art critic Shūzō Takiguchi, who wrote in 1957 that Bokujinkai works were still preserving traditional standards for calligraphy.
[45] Yoshihara urged the group to discard moji-sei, but their decision to preserve it created distance between calligraphy and growing experimentation in avant-garde painting in Japan.
The 1954 Japanese Calligraphy exhibition at MoMA, for example, was covered by The Washington Post and Arts Digest, and in both reviews, parallels were made between the avant-garde calligraphic works and Abstract Expressionist paintings on view in New York.