井上有一
‐堂々ト書ケ‐

Yu-ichi Inoue -Draw passionately and elegantly-

The great retrospective exhibition A Centennial Exhibition INOUE Yu-ichi, held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa last year, concluded with overwhelmingly positive reviews. In recent years, his works have gathered attention at auctions primarily in Hong Kong, and international collectors and museums collect his oeuvres.

After the end of World War II, he did not conform to the traditional calligraphy world and advocated liberation from existing methods. As a result, his calligraphy as expression of his personal mind rose through the art spheres. Today Yu-ichi’s calligraphy works are regarded as important comparable to contemporary art movements such as European Art Informel, American Abstract Expressionism and Gutai in Japan. Yu-ichi mentioned that “Chinese characters shouldn’t be seen only as symbols of communication in shape and sound. Calligraphy exists for deeper reasons”. With his words, we are aware that his calligraphy successfully expressed something new which had never been created from notions of Western art, and he produced a completely new style of expression beyond ideographical nature and structural beauty with simple materials – sheets of paper and India ink.

In our exhibition of Yu-ichi Inoue, not only single character calligraphy being at the core of his career but also several multi-character calligraphy works which stir our emotion will be exhibited.
We deeply hope that you thoroughly enjoy the dignified calligraphy created by Yu-ichi who purely devoted his life to drawing.