Word (Koto)

Okabe Sōfū (1910–2001) chaired a major post-war calligraphy society called Sōrōsha, which was established in 1966 to develop modern calligraphy in the avant-garde style zen’eisho (“avant-garde script”) or bokushō (“ink impression”). This style mainly consisted of writing individual ideograms, “sizeable characters” daijisho, and “capturing the spirit of character in brushstroke” hitsu’i. An emphasis on individual concepts of interpretation helped develop a looser calligraphic rendition of characters and the written expression approached the language of abstract painting. Calligraphy acquired the position of a new artistic genre in the post-war period. Master Okabe Sōfū is represented in the National Gallery Prague by the kana genre, i.e. calligraphy of individual syllables, namely the syllables of Koto, a phonetic form of the Japanese reading of the character (Word) transcribed in the hiragana script. The theme expresses the very essence of calligraphy, namely the visual concept of the term / word.