◆ Jiang Feng, chief writer of "Japanese Overseas Chinese Daily".
When it comes to the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest", people's first reaction should be "Chinese!" However, ancient Japanese painters also had a soft spot for this. As a "novice artist", I know that famous ancient Japanese painters such as Kano Masanobu, Kaibei Tomomatsu, and Yukimura Shutsugi have all passed down the "Seven Sages". Of course, my favorite among them is the screen painting "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest" by the Japanese Momoyama period painter Hayagawa and other uncles.
From April 13th to May 26th, the Kyoto National Museum in Japan held a special exhibition entitled "The Legend of the Snow Boat - The Birth of the 'Painting Saint'", in which more than 90 exhibits include this "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest Screen".
Hasegawa et al. in this painting is inscribed "Five generations from the snow boat". In fact, he was born in 1539 into a samurai family on the Noto Peninsula in today's Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. When Chinese mention Japanese "samurai", they will immediately think of "bushido" that commits suicide by caesarean section, but they rarely know that "Japanese samurai" is still the "creator" of "Japanese culture". For example, Japan's tea ceremony culture is inseparable from the samurai of Japan's Sengoku period. Hasegawa's adoptive grandfather, Hasegawa Mubun, and adoptive father, Hasegawa Munekiyo, both studied painting with Yukishu. In this way, Hasegawa and other uncles naturally think that they are also Xuezhou's "school grandchildren". It seems that there is a suspicion of "rubbing hot spots", and there is no big fault in picking it up.
However, Hasegawa et al.'s "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest Screen" is not really to reproduce the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest" of the Jin Dynasty in China, but to show the "painting saint" Xuezhou that he greatly admires in his mind. Mr. Yuya Fukushi, Director of the Conservation and Repair Office of the Kyoto National Museum, said, "Sketching figures with a few brushstrokes is a proud technique of the Chinese Southern Song Dynasty painter Liang Kai. Hasegawa and others were influenced by the snow boat to paint the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest Screen". It seems that the Chinese have "borrowed poetry and speech", and the Japanese have "borrowed painting and speech".
In fact, Japan's "painting saint" Xuezhou is really related to China. This is not because he was born in "Beichu Chihama (today's Koshasha, Okayama Prefecture, Japan)", but because he once visited China as a painter in the "Ming Mission", and studied the classical painting style of the Song and Yuan dynasties in China and the Zhejiang School of painting in the Ming Dynasty. As the fifth-generation disciple of Xuezhou, Hasegawa and others loved his "painter" and naturally inherited his "painting style".
Some commentators are not optimistic about Hasegawa et al.'s "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest Screen", pointing out that his 69-year-old work is more rugged and rough than his 50-year-old work, and lacks the original sense of slenderness that conveys the painter's mood. I thought that a master's paintings must have something to do with his state of mind at the time of painting. When he was 50 years old, the "masters" such as Kano Eitoku, who overwhelmed him, passed away one after another. At the age of 69, he has experienced many hardships, and the polishing of the years has made his pen more stagnant, especially the killing of his friend, the Japanese "tea saint" Sen no Rikyu, which made him feel more discouraged. If he knew how to find a woman who was decades younger to adjust his spiritual life, he might be able to have new creativity, but he was immersed in sorrow and naturally exhausted. Some people even suspect that "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest Screen" is his disciple's "gunman's work".
In his book "What I Want to Know More About the Life and Works of Hasegawa and Other Uncles" (Tokyo Art Publishing House, February 2010, first edition), Kuroda introduced that in the fifteenth year of Keicho (1610), Tokugawa Ieyasu, the "Sunfu-sama", asked Hasegawa and others to travel east to Edo to see him. At that time, there were no Shinkansen trains in Japan, and the traffic conditions were extremely poor. The 72-year-old Hasegawa and other uncles thought about the "Hasegawa School" they founded, and it can be said that they risked their lives to go there. As a result, he became seriously ill during a long trip and died two days after arriving in Edo (present-day Tokyo).
Today, looking at the paintings of Hasegawa and others, and thinking about the life of Hasegawa and others, I am afraid that I can only "sigh". I don't know how Tokugawa Ieyasu, the "old fox", felt when he learned of the death of Hasegawa and other uncles?
(April 24, 2024 in Tokyo)