Haboku (Flung-ink) Landscape (c. 1510): Art, History and Details

Haboku (Flung-ink) Landscape (c. 1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Shūgetsu Tōkan (Japanese, 1440?–1529).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This vague but energetically rendered landscape highlights the brush: the messenger for a moment’s emotional or spiritual state. The painting represents one of many subjects and styles Shugetsu studied and absorbed from the great practitioners of Ming-dynasty China in the late 1400s and early 1500s. The technique of "flung ink," or haboku, disguises purposeful composition as an almost random, distracted series of brushstrokes. Close inspection reveals tonalities and strokes brushed onto a soft, absorbent paper in a range from heavy and wet to crisp ink charges. Not surprisingly, amateur and professional Zen monk-painters favored this "impressionistic" style as an exercise in seeing meaningful detail slowly emerge from what at first seems unclear.

Object facts

• Title: Haboku (Flung-ink) Landscape
• Date: c. 1510
• Creator attribution: Shūgetsu Tōkan (Japanese, 1440?–1529)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 59.5 x 26.9 cm (23 7/16 x 10 9/16 in.); Overall: 151.1 x 40.6 cm (59 1/2 x 16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1976.59

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1976." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 64, no. 2 (1977): 39-78.
• Lee, Sherman E., Michael R. Cunningham, and Ursula Korneitchouk. One Thousand Years of Japanese Art (650-1650): From the Cleveland Museum of Art : Catalogue. [New York]: Japan Society, 1981.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Tōyō kaiga no seika: Kurīvurando Bijutsukan no korekushon kara : tokubetsuten. 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.