Very few books exist, in the English-speaking world at least, detailing one of Japan’s most prominent artists. The 15th century Zen Buddhist painter Sesshū Tōyō is considered among the greatest ink-painters of his time, whose cross-cultural travels to China came to redefine the Japanese artistic style and identity. Even so, no book-length study on Sesshū has been published in English for more than 80 years.
Steffani Bennett, assistant professor and Joan B. Mirviss Chair in Japanese Art in the Department of Art History, has worked extensively and exclusively on Sesshū throughout her career — partly because there’s no shortage of information on the artist in the scholarly field of Japanese art, at least in Japan.
“It’s really hard to overstate the legacy Sesshū has had in Japan,” Bennett says. “When I embarked on studying Sesshū, my advisors were a bit leery because he’s been very thoroughly studied in Japan.”
Few, however, had analyzed the works of Sesshū from a cross-cultural perspective, drawing on historical materials from the Chinese cultural, political and religious context that is so central to Sesshū’s work. It’s from this direction that Bennett targets a larger, more daunting project: compiling a comprehensive study of Sesshū in a field where English publications on the artist are virtually non-existent.
“I’m not really positioning it as a biography,” Bennett says. “But I do feel this responsibility to write something in the English language that is comprehensive and authoritative on Sesshū, because nothing of that nature exists today.”
Bennett grew up largely in East Asia, mostly in China and Taiwan, while her parents worked in the Foreign Service. Her mother, especially, was a Sinophile, someone who was very interested in Chinese art. Throughout Bennett’s childhood, she would take her on trips to museums and temples. By the time Bennett attended college, she had already developed a strong interest in pre-modern Chinese art.
It was during her high school years in Taiwan that Bennett became interested in Japan. This was an interest that she continued to pursue as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. After graduation, Bennett knew she wanted to pursue doctoral studies, but she was faced with the question of deciding between the fields of Chinese and Japanese art history.
She chose to study Japan, but with a subject who shared, like her, an affinity for Chinese art — Sesshū.
“He was the first professional pre-modern Japanese painter to travel to China,” Bennett says. “That really was the most transformative experience of his life, certainly for his artistic career.”
As a young man, Sesshū left his hometown for Kyōto, the then-capital and cultural center of Japan. He studied with Tenshō Shūbun, the most prominent Japanese painter of his time, while residing at the Shōkoku-ji temple not too far from the palatial residence of the ruling Ashikaga family. Zen Buddhist monk-painters like Shūbun were enamored with Chinese painters of the Song dynasty (960-1279), painters active centuries before their own time. One such Song painter was Xia Gui, whose landscape paintings used more ink than color, emphasizing the textural qualities of brushwork.
In the mid-1450s, however, Sesshū left the cultural center in Kyoto and relocated to the southwestern city of Yamaguchi, headquarters of the powerful Ōuchi clan. The Ōuchi clan maintained good trading relations with China and Korea, and it was this contact with the continent that likely attracted Sesshū to the Ōuchi’s domain. Indeed, in 1467 Sesshū was among the few members of the government’s 12th diplomatic mission to the Ming imperial court in China, sailing on an Ōuchi-chartered ship bound for the port city of Ningbo. From there, he would travel up the Grand Canal for the next year with a small group of delegation members until they reached the Ming capital of Beijing, where he stayed until his return in 1469.
In pre-modern Japan, Chinese art — particularly Song dynasty landscape paintings — was considered cultural treasure for the elite.
“The shoguns during Sesshū’s lifetime had quite sizable collections of Chinese paintings, which they viewed as treasures,” Bennett says.
While paintings imported from China commanded great prestige, paintings by Japanese painters rendered in Chinese styles tended to be seen as secondary imitations.
“There was a very clear hierarchical distinction between the two,” Bennett says.
Sesshū, Bennett argues, was the first Japanese painter to break the hierarchical division.
“He was really the first Japanese painter to take what was a Sinitic style and make it something that was valued on its own terms,” Bennett says.
Sesshū’s Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons, for example, is the first pair of large-scale Chinese-style paintings in the bird-and-flower genre produced in Japan. It was a style that Sesshū encountered at the Chinese court and which would influence successive schools of painters like the Kano school.
It also stood as a mark of Sesshū’s official renown and importance. When the Ōuchi clan in Yamaguchi took Sesshū as their painter-in-attendance, they commissioned Sesshū to paint this pair of Birds and Flowers screens to commemorate a political marriage instrumental in the Ōuchi clan’s victories in a prolonged civil war.
It was both stylistic uniqueness and the sense of “painterhood” that Sesshū established in Japan. In 1486, more than 15 years after his return from China, Sesshū would produce his painting known as the Long Landscape, a scroll which stretches almost 51 feet. The painting moves through mountain ridges in his distinctively bold and angular strokes. It progresses from a scene of spring at the start of the scroll to a snow-covered landscape at its end, visually compressing space and time.
As Bennett notes, this is the monumental painting that marked Sesshū’s departure from the realm of “Chinese-style painting” in medieval Japan and heralded the emergence of the “Sesshū style.” It was a mode of painting deeply informed by the painter’s experiences in contemporary China but which would come to be valued on its own terms as a prestigious mode of Japanese painting. As a final mark, Sesshū would sign his name assertively on the scroll, a gesture that was very rare for professional painters before his time.
“He tells us his age. He gives the title of his monastic position during his travels in China,” Bennett says. “And in doing so, he’s making a statement that he’s painting this not as an anonymous painter reproducing a certain Chinese style but instead as a Japanese painter, as Sesshū.”
In other words, an artist moving beyond the limits of imitation.
To historicize art is to open windows to an artist’s inner life and situate them through time and place. It’s also about inferring what we share with those who are long dead.
“I was very attracted to Sesshū early on, because he kind of reminded me of my mom, who is a true Sinophile,” Bennett says. “She studied Chinese geography in graduate school and was the first of my parents to enter the Foreign Service. She did that so she could go to China.”
Years later, Bennett would travel to China for research, visiting the very same temple outside Ningbo where Sesshū received his honorary monastic title in the 15th century.
“I spoke to one of the monks there. That was pretty much the only place I went in China where they knew Sesshū’s name,” Bennett says. “As soon as I mentioned Sesshū, they started telling me all of these things they had heard about him visiting their temple in the 15th century and so forth.”
To Bennett, the art historian’s academic relationship to their subject can become a personal and biographical one. Sesshū’s work as an artist reflects only part of his professional identity.
“There are a lot of ways in which he kind of marks a new paradigm of painterhood,” Bennett says. “Sesshū becomes so influential not just because of what he painted or the way he painted it, but because of the way he engaged with the concept of being a painter. Sesshū redefined what it meant to be a painter in premodern Japan.”
He enterprises, freelances, travels — he did things in a manner in which many of us might see some reflection of our own lives.