Shigajiku

[3] The most common visual aesthetic for shigajiku is a monochrome water and ink style of painting, suibokuga 水墨画, with only occasional traces of color throughout the scroll.

Monks of the tatuchū communities popularized the idea of creating idealizing, memorializing, and pining images of the scholar's study to escape the confines of a private subtemple.

A scholar's study shigajiku aids in evoking an idealized landscape to help the monk bring about a sense of peaceful serenity through which they would write, meditate, reflect, etc.

Painters manipulated their surroundings and were forced to use their imagination or memory to create these landscapes that were so far removed from their own setting of a bustling Japanese city.

Often looking to the deep mountains valleys one would find in China – these tiny idealists landscapes became a monks’ flight from reality via Chinese inspiration.

[14] Ancient crooked pine trees clinging tenaciously to a sheer cliff, hills in the distance, vast expanse of water and sky, this secluded corner of nature would have been beloved by Zen monks and their followers and are some of the most common tropes of shigajiku.

[17] The “new style” is believed to be largely derived from the Southern Sung, specifically Xia Gui (1195–1224), with the central focus of the composition moved into a corner of the scroll to create a dynamic and asymmetrical image.

Reading in a Bamboo Grove encompasses the most common tropes of the shigajiku, the imposing mountains, with sheer cliffs, trees precariously perched near edges, and hints of a vast open horizon.

The positioning of the mountain scene in the corner and the poetic inscriptions above and opposite the image dramatically accentuates the asymmetrical nature of the scroll.

The solitude yet tranquil atmosphere of the landscape provides the perfect escape for the monks who were writing and discussing the poems in busy city of Koyto.

The shigajiku medium enables the mind to reach that level of contemplation where the world disappears and all one hears is nature – a state greatly desired by these city dwelling monks.

The first shigajiku, Newly Risen Moon over a Brushwood Gate, follows “the classic formulation of the relation between poetry and painting developed by Su Shih and his circle, which we have seen also was a crucial factor in the rise of the earliest Japanese poem-and-painting scrolls around.”[26] Poem-and-painting scrolls were intended, from the beginning of their production, to be understood as a whole piece of art with different mediums (“four perfections”) used to convey a single artwork.

Hue of Water, Light on the Peaks The scholarly retreat depicted on the scroll shows and idyllic and peaceful setting surrounded by nature.

This structural ambiguity can be seen as an attempt to render a scholars retreat that is truly separate from reality, “this painting is an excellent example of the art produced within the cultural sphere of Zen Buddhism, which shunned the worldly realm.”[30] Splashed Ink Landscape With the dedicatory inscription at the top of the scroll written by Sesshū himself, Sesshū’s scroll slowly reveals itself to the reader.