Kiefern

This is a pair of six-panel folding screens painted in ink around 1595, in the Momoyama period, when Japan's warlords were commissioning gold-leafed screens loud with colour to line their new castles. Tohaku did the opposite. He painted pine trees dissolving in and out of mist, some trunks firm and near, others fading to almost nothing, and left great stretches of the paper bare. That emptiness is the subject as much as the trees. It draws on the Zen idea of ma, the charged space between things. Tohaku worked fast, using a coarse straw brush on relatively rough paper to get the dry, broken strokes at the scale he needed. He had absorbed the Chinese ink tradition and the older Japanese master Sesshu, but painting nothing but trees at this size, with no story and no setting, had not really been done before. Japan later named the screens a National Treasure. Up close you can still see where the straw bristles dragged and split across the sheet.