The Touch of Hand and Brush

                     An Interview with Stephen Addiss

                     by Jeanne Emrich

Stephen Addiss, PhD, is a Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities: Art at the University of Richmond, Virginia.  He is the author of over thirty-five books on the visual and literary arts of Japan and China, including How to Look at Japanese Art; Old Taoist; Haiku People; A Haiku Menagerie; A Haiku Garden; and Haiku Landscapes. In 1995, he organized the landmark exhibition, Haiga: Takebe Sōchō and the Haiku-Painting Tradition, which first appeared at the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond and then toured the United States, giving many in the West their first glimpse of this art form.

You began your working life as a musician, composing concert music and traveling in Asia, Africa , and Europe to perform traditional and folk music of many countries.  How did you find your way to Japanese art and to haiga in particular?

My first interest in East Asia came from a class at Harvard and then in studying with John Cage, who occasionally talked about his studies of Zen with D. T. Suzuki.  However, it was not until my travels to Asia as a musician that I became thoroughly involved with East Asian aesthetics, eventually focusing upon Zen, Zen painting (Zenga),  (Zenga is capitalized? YES) literati painting (nanga), haiku poetry, and haiku painting (haiga).   I began to collect and study works on my own, and since I had gone to schools that emphasized that the best way to learn is to try something oneself (City and Country School in New York City and then Putney School in Vermont), I started taking lessons in brush painting and calligraphy from Wang Chi-yuan and Ishikawa Kako in New York City.  No one student could have been worse!  In fact, when helping other people get started in brushwork later, I’ve never discovered anyone so clumsy and untalented as I was.  I had tried painting and drawing several times before, and always stopped due to my despair at the results, but this time I persevered, knowing that it would at least help me to see and understand Japanese art better.

One day, a few years later, I looked down at my work and I was delighted— it had advanced all the way to mediocre!  After that it was easier to continue, and now after almost forty years of practice, I am asked to exhibit in various countries— I suspect that in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan it has been out of curiosity as to what the “gaijin” (foreigner) has done, but that’s fine too.

Meanwhile, after a few years of self-study, eventually I decided that I needed more formal training, so I went to the University of Michigan (14 years after graduating from college!) to study a combination of Asian art and music. Since that time I have been teaching East Asian art and culture, first at the University of Kansas and now at the University of Richmond.  My enthusiasm has led to working on a number of exhibitions and books, many dealing with Japanese haiku.

Although I myself had occasionally composed haiku before this time, it was translating inscriptions on paintings that led me to work more seriously.  For example, I found that I couldn’t translate haiku into English in 5-7-5 syllables without “padding,” since English is more concise than Japanese.  Translating helped lead me to create more of my own haiku, and eventually haiga.  At a certain point, Jim Kacian asked me and my friends in Richmond if we would like to take over South by Southeast, a haiku and haiku arts magazine, and we have been editing and publishing for the past seven years or so.  Once again, learning by doing has been important, and SxSE helps to focus our attention on many aspects of the haiku world today.

What I have realized from my experiences is how life can take unexpected directions—I believed that my whole life would be music, but accidentally seeing a Zen painting in a window in Tokyo led me to Japanese art, and then translating inscriptions on paintings led me back to poetry (I had written quite a lot from grade school through college days), and before I knew it, my entire life had changed.  I still believe it’s helpful to have a plan and not just drift, but being open to unexpected possibilities is equally important.

You are an accomplished calligrapher and have exhibited your work internation-ally.  What type of calligraphy do you prefer and why?  Is your calligraphy a kind of meditative practice for you, an artistic endeavor, or both? 

In the broader sense that any focused activity can be a meditative practice, calligraphy certainly has that aspect for me; in fact, when the mind is all jumbled, the results show up in the work immediately, so calming the mind both before and during the work is important. As for scripts and styles, I prefer to do calligraphy in Chinese characters (kanji) but I also do some in Japanese and some in English (although we are limited by 26 letters while Chinese has more than 50,000 characters and five scripts). The possibilities are so immense that one can never learn all the characters and their variations, much less all the potentials for putting them together in compositions, and added to these is the flexible East Asian brush that reproduces every aspect of your being in the work.  Endlessly fascinating, calligraphy is truly a joy.

How has working in this art contributed to your understanding of haiga as was practiced by the old masters and also to the haiga you make yourself?

I regret that we often divide the creating of art from art history, since I know from experience that painting deepens the understanding of what others have done, and vice-versa.  My own attempts at haiga have given me new eyes to look at the old masters, whom I admire even more due to this interaction.  Conversely, old masters have inspired me, not directly in that I take their ideas, but more generally in their freedom, freshness, humor, simplicity, and skill. Once in a great while I have actually copied a Japanese haiga, just to see what the brush and mind were doing, but this is very rare, I feel it is more important to absorb their spirit and attitude towards haiga and apply it to our own day.

I see a great deal of the playfulness of the traditional masters in your haiga. Your calligraphy and images often intermix to humorous effect and seem to be floating on the page as if to suggest a light-hearted or dream-like state of mind, as in your “winter thaw” or a kind of enchantment in nature, as in your “slanting sun” or even a smiling sense of sexual titillation, such as in “Saturday night.”  Do you see this playfulness arising naturally out of your haiku or the sketchiness of the images as you portray them, or a combination of both?  Why is haiga, especially hand-drawn or hand-brushed haiga, particularly conducive to humor?

Humor and playfulness are certainly important elements in traditional haiga, although sometimes the smile is wistful or melancholy.  I think this has two different roots.  The first is the importance of humor as expressed in Japanese culture, where it is more often seen than in traditional Chinese arts (perhaps because of Confucianism, which is very earnest).  This importance of humor was reinforced by Zen, since humor can break up the rigidity of linear thinking; the “ah” moment when one gets a joke might be seen as a tiny echo of the “AH” moment of Zen enlightenment.

Secondly, haiku began as a form of humorous verse, and even after it was deepened by Basho, it still has retained a sense of playfulness that comes out as well in many haiga.  Basho’s own final aesthetic was “lightness,” and it seems to me that haiku and haiga both lose their way if they become too heavy and serious— that path leads to moralizing and pontificating, the greatest enemies of the haiku spirit.

On the website of the Japan Sekiho Haiga Association, there is this quotation:

“To draw haiga, one has to return the heart of a child, without being bound by anything, and to express freely and boldly whatever beautiful image occurs to one's mind. Thus the heart is naturaly relaxed and it becomes pleasure to draw.” Do you find this state of child-like mind present when you create your own haiga?  How does your medium of choice – ink brush painting – contribute to this?

I like this comment, but there is another step that must accompany this child-like-ness (quite different from childishness).  As well as the heart of a child, one must also have a certain amount of technical skill.  This need not be overt— in fact it is better when hidden— but without a certain amount of technique, one’s vision cannot be expressed effectively.  I am reminded of haiga by Issa— at first they seem the work of a child, and not even a very adept child, but with time the true wonder of his work is revealed. Even Buson, the one truly great painter among haiku masters, painted his haiga very simply and seemingly artlessly; even so, some haiga admirers find him a little bit too expert.  Ultimately it is no different from haiku poetry; one wants the work to seem totally natural, without drawing attention to the technique that helped create it.

I understand that you still pursue your musical interests.  How has your music evolved over the years?  Has it influenced your work in the visual arts and haiga, in particular?

Yes, I continue to compose concert music which fortunately is getting performed, since unlike writing and painting it requires an intermediary (the musicians) before it fully comes alive.  I don’t know how it has evolved, expect that at this stage in my life I feel fully free to compose anything I wish without worrying about current styles or theories.  My most recent piece is called “9+9” and it consists of nine of my haiku sung by two sopranos with cello, interspersed with nine more “haiku” merely played by the cello (these in 5-7-5 note groupings).  It will be premiered here at the University of Richmond in December.  
        More broadly, I think everything we do influences our haiku and haiga, and the same in return, so as I consider your interesting question, I think that I compose more minimally than before, with more sense of suggestion rather than outright declaration.

In 1995, you organized the first major exhibition in the United States to display Japanese haiga by the traditional masters.  Tell us the story of how that landmark exhibition came to be. Is Takebe Sochō, whom you featured in the exhibition, one of your favorite poet-painters?  Have any haiga in this collection been particularly inspiring to you?

The exhibition came from two factors.  First was my interest in Japanese haiga and wanting to do an exhibition, and second was meeting a collector from Tokyo named Masuda who was a descendant of Sochō and had collected many of his works.  Since Socho is one of the most interesting haiga masters, it made sense to have an exhibition that contained many haijin but focused on Sochō’s work as a way to show one artist in some depth.  Of course I am became very fond of several of his poem-paintings, such as his rendition of people gathered at a country inn.  My favorite work in the show, however, was the haiga by Issa with his well-known poem on the garden butterfly.

Traditional haiga is still being produced in Japan on such media as rice paper and shikishi boards, but also on the Internet, where even the haiga master Sekiho Yabumoto has a website. It still seems to fit into the Japanese culture, although in competition with contemporary Eastern and Western art trends.  How do you see it fitting into our Western culture or how would you like it to fit in?  What creative ventures would you encourage contemporary poet-painters to explore?

I think haiga has just begun to make a dent in Western culture, and your work with Reeds: Contemporary Haiga in print and now online has been an important part of that evolution.  I foresee haiga going in two directions simultaneously—first in traditional formats, since the personal touch of the hand and brush is so significant and expressive, and second in new media where imagination and creativity can also be explored.  I would encourage people to try both forms, and not to be discouraged if the hand-work does not always go easily at first.  Judging from my own example, even someone who started with very little talent can enjoy creating and developing haiga throughout a lifetime.

NOTE: Haiga: Takebe Socho and the Haiku-Painting Tradition by Stephen Addiss is a book-catalog in English devoted to historic Japanese haiga. It may be purchased postpaid by sending $33 in US currency or money order to Stephen Addiss, Art Department, University of Richmond, VA 23113, USA.

Return to the Reeds: Contemporary Haiga Main Page.