Sound of the Wind in the Pines (and Seven-Character Line Calligraphy)

Sound of the Wind in the Pines (松籟図, Shōrai-zu) is a 1918 [diptych](/glossary/diptych) of hanging scrolls by Hashimoto Kansetsu, in ink and light color on paper, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 13214.1-2). The composition combines a painting of pines stirred by the wind with a calligraphic scroll inscribing a seven-character classical Chinese line — a pairing that explicitly aligns the picture with the literati painting tradition in which painted image and calligraphic inscription form a unified work. The 'sound of the wind in the pines' is a centuries-old motif in East Asian poetry, used in Chan Buddhist verse to evoke the impersonal voice of nature and the dissolution of the self into the natural world. Kansetsu's brushwork in the painting draws on the ink-painting traditions of the Song masters he studied during his travels in China, while the calligraphy demonstrates the classical training in Chinese letters he had received from his father, the Confucian scholar Hashimoto Kaikan. The diptych shows Kansetsu at the height of his early Taishō engagement with kanga and is among the major Kansetsu works in American institutional collections.