Artworks

Catching a Catfish with a Gourd

Artwork · Josetsu · c. 1413 · kakemono · Taizō-in

Commissioned by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s son Ashikaga Yoshimochi (1380–1428) for a small Chinese-style standing screen; thirty Zen monks wrote poems on it, introduced by Taigaku Shūsū, and it was later remounted as a hanging scroll with the poems above. A kōan made visible: how to catch a slippery catfish with a gourd? A strange, solitary man with a porcine face holds a gourd in front of the fish in a flat, barren landscape, mountains in the mist beyond. Josetsu, a monk of Shōkokuji, was a teacher of Shūbun. 1 Mason 2005, p. 224, fig. 258. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.