Unorthdox Inklings

“attention to the making of (…) works may be a precondition to understanding the nature of their meaning.” (1)

When figurative art began a surrender to modernist values and abstraction in the 20th century, there accompanied both artistic de-skilling and a critical devaluation of skill. Much else of what was jettisoned in the pursuit of high modernism was recovered for contemporary art in the later 20th century. Interest in artistic skill, however, has mostly not witnessed such repossession.
This has resulted in an apparent bind for contemporary sumi ink painters as skill in sumi ink painting is often polar-positional. Positioned as traditional, the sumi ink painter is enjoined to enact their time-honed skills using conventional materials whilst pursuing usually nature-based subject matter. Positioned as contemporary, the painter is expected, at least in part, to abandon or upend these.
Flint Sato proposes an alternative to this art world antagonism. In her commitment to sumi ink painting tools and materials, and her decades long study of how these behave in symbiosis under different conditions, she has sought to make the media her own. Once acquired, artistic skills are a possession that might more freely be directed to per- sonalized creative means and not ends. In this, then, the tutelage and visual history of sumi ink painting is not so much revered or abandoned as engaged. And this provides Flint Sato, a non-East Asian pursuing a traditionalist approach to artistic materials and processes, the artistic license to bury papers with rusted iron and dig them up later on (2005); boil sumi ink (2008) and aesthetically document its surface precipitates in pho- tography (2011); hand-paint the Heart Sutra (2015) in English script while simultane- ously abstracting it to look like a visual recession of an expanse of water; produce video performances like the writing of Now (2015); and pursue ink abstraction in contempo- rary formats like the installation Boat of Dreams (2017) with its sheets of washi paper draped from the ceiling of an Edo Period school building.
Flint Sato’s ink beginnings were in calligraphy. She initially took calligraphy to be a kind of abstraction owing to the kanji character corpus being, on first encounter, without clearly delineated meanings. This decade-long tutelage between 1982-92 also provided her with a quite different set of formative abstract concepts crucial for her later painting practices: movement, shape, line, form, space, connection and continuum.
Overlaid on this was an encounter pivotal for Flint Sato’s shift from calligrapher to painter. Seeing a video featuring the contemporary ink landscape painting of Li Huayi (b.1948) provided her with a methodology. Li would often pour the background in his figurative paintings and then do texture strokes over top, filling in figurative elements. In this Flint Sato found she could generate new creative possibilities in the pouring, bleeding, straining, dribbling, or sometimes spraying, of ink. Texture and detail could be added thereafter, though Li’s figuration never become her own predilection.

Most commonly Flint Sato’s material engagement is with the conventional nature-based East Asian “four treasures:” ink, brush, inkstone, and paper, though sometimes she in- troduces a limited water-based acrylic color palette that adds subtle granular surface ef- fects, as in Cloud Dust 3 (2020). In early work she made single scrolls. Thereafter ar- rived the creative inducement to make larger-scaled works with imagery that flowed across several scrolls mounted alongside one another, such as Islands Flow (2017-18). As in the contemporary art world in which thematic and genre concepts of moving across borders and boundaries has been given increasing import, her method of working across multiple scrolls has the notable consonance of moving beyond the geographical and cultural particularity of this usually presumed East Asian format.
In her artistic process, designs are worked out in her sketchbook, then compositions are sketched out on paper laid on the floor. For this, ink is applied with a bamboo stick, and this is, for her, an unusual concession to a “non-traditional” practice. A stick is used be- cause it leaves comparatively “neutral” marks. Brush marks, she finds, are immediately “expressive” and initially undesirable. Ink is then poured, and water is added in re- sponse to the ink’s flowing, pooling and bleeding. The artist’s intention is both to work with less personal control of her medium and in dialogue with it, without forcing a con- clusion upon its movements and alchemies, tonal ranges and three-dimensional effects. Allowing the ink and paper to half-dry, she then builds up further layers. Fully dried, she paints into the layered washes with smaller detailed texture strokes made with a tiny brush (some works, however, are mostly poured water and ink with little brushwork).
This beginning and end of this process complete a conceptual distinction for the painter. The embryonic pouring of ink originates a macroscopic world view. Form is produced in the pouring and building up of ink layers, apprehended as surfaces, veils, or sculptur- al undulations that abandon the graphic minimalism usually associated with the concept of line. The addition of texture strokes creates a complementing microscopic view. As form is conventionally conceived as an outside that closets an internal structure, Flint Sato opens her poured forms using texture strokes, moving inside to the internal spaces and fleshing out their microscale existence. In doing so, the veil of form is lifted and an inner life is revealed. In this combination of macro and micro the artist conceives a synthetic view of reality.

Matthew Larking
Art historian and critic
Associate Professor Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan
2023

(1) Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 8.