Muqi
The Chan monk with the ink brush.
Muqi was a Chan Buddhist monk in Hangzhou. His spontaneous ink paintings, such as Six Persimmons, were forgotten in China but became greatly loved in Japan.
Muqi, whose monastic name was Fachang, was born around 1210 in Sichuan and died around 1269. He became a monk of Chan Buddhism, the school known in Japan as Zen, and was active at a temple near the West Lake in Hangzhou. According to the sources he criticised a powerful minister and was forced to go into hiding for a time, but the information is scant.
Muqi painted in ink on paper or silk: birds, monkeys, fruit, landscapes and Buddhist figures. The brushstrokes are few, quick and assured, and empty space is given great prominence. The pictures are meant not merely to depict things but to express the Chan idea of direct, sudden insight. His best-known work, Six Persimmons, shows six fruits in a row in different tones of black and grey. The picture looks simple but is very carefully balanced.
Six Persimmons, like a famous triptych of Guanyin between a crane and monkeys, is in the Daitoku-ji temple in Kyoto. He also painted the series Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, landscapes in mist and rain, which survives only in parts.
In China some critics considered his style crude and careless, and he was almost forgotten. But Japanese monks visiting China took his works home with them, and in Japan he became one of the most admired Chinese painters. His pictures were collected by the shoguns and influenced Japanese ink painting and the aesthetics of the tea ceremony. Today he is regarded as one of the great masters of East Asian Zen painting.