Drunken Li Bai

Drunken Li Bai (Suiribaku, 酔李白) is a Taishō-period hanging-scroll painting in ink on paper by Hashimoto Kansetsu, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art and dated to the 1920s. The subject is the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762), one of the towering figures of classical Chinese literature, in his characteristic pose of inebriation: leaning, slightly off-balance, his court robe falling open, his face flushed with the wine that drove so much of his poetry. The motif descends from the Song painter Liang Kai's famous brush portrait of Li Bai, one of the most influential reductive ink paintings in East Asian art, and Kansetsu's treatment is a direct homage to that tradition. The brushwork is exceptionally spare, with a few authoritative strokes carrying the robe, the figure's weight, and the lyrical drunkenness that the picture is meant to convey. Drunken Li Bai is one of Kansetsu's most concentrated demonstrations of the literati ink-painting manner that he absorbed during his repeated travels to China and applied to his own work in the 1920s.