"The Low Overpowers the High"

Among contemporary calligraphers, Suda Kokuta achieved a reputation for a vigorous, rebellious, and even confrontational style of brush writing. He began his career experimenting with figurative painting in various media, but came into his own as an artist in the 1950s when he moved into abstraction and avant-garde calligraphy. He became close to those involved with the publication of the art journal Bokubi, which sought to situate calligraphy in the context of modern art movements, and to the Bokujin-kai members who supported and contributed to its publication. Bokubi was edited by the unconventional calligrapher Inoue Yuichi (1916–1985) and documented the group’s activities and discussions on calligraphy and modern art. An article in that journal tracing Kokuta’s evolution from figurative to abstract painting helped establish his reputation. In his later career, Suda achieved fame for his experimentation with nearly abstract calligraphic compositions, as shown here. He later also joined Kokugakai (National Painting Association) and immersed himself in the study of writings by Japanese philosophers and texts about Zen Buddhism. He practiced zazen (seated meditation) and applied the precepts of Zen to his creative work, as monks of medieval and early modern times had before him.

Here the phrase gekokujō下剋上, literally, “the lower overpowers the high” has multiple connotations ranging from political to spiritual. Originally the phrase derives from a Confucian idea of “government from below,” or government of the people rather than one of laws. In Japanese history, beginning with the Sengoku (Warring Provinces) period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Muromachi shoguns were ousted from power and the capital of Kyoto mostly destroyed, vassals often undermined their lords, and were in turn under constant threat of betrayal. Yet in the context of Suda’s oeuvre, we should interpret it in a more philosophical sense of how the small things in life sometimes are of greater importance that bigger issues. Sometimes, meditation on natural phenomena takes priority over fixation on uncontrollable world events. Surely the inscription of this phrase also had autobiographical connotations for the artist, since the fairly rare variant for the character koku 剋, meaning to “overpower,” “overturn,” or to cause “upheaval” is the same character used to write part of his name.