Seated Avalokiteshvara with Lotus

Seated Avalokiteshvara with Lotus is a hanging-scroll painting by Murakami Kagaku in ink and light color on paper, completed in 1935 and now held by the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi. The work belongs to the great series of solitary Bodhisattva paintings that Kagaku produced during his long retirement at Suma between 1927 and his death in 1939 — a body of small, intensely concentrated works that many critics regard as the most spiritually concentrated achievement of twentieth-century Japanese painting. Avalokiteshvara (Kannon in Japanese), the Bodhisattva of compassion and the most widely venerated Buddhist deity in East Asia, is here shown seated in meditation, holding a lotus flower in the iconographic gesture that signifies the spotless purity arising from the muddy waters of samsaric existence. Kagaku's handling is extraordinarily restrained: a few hundred lines of pale ink, with minimal color accents and a fragile, calligraphic energy that owes as much to the late ink play of the seventeenth-century Chinese individualists Shitao and Bada Shanren as it does to the orthodox iconography of the Japanese Buddhist tradition. The work stands as one of the central documents of Kagaku's late style and one of the most refined Bodhisattva paintings of the modern Japanese tradition.