Rainfall / The Sound of Tea

"Rainfall / The Sound of Tea" from 1956 — the year of the Venice Biennale Grand Prize — brings together two subjects that seem at first disparate but share a quality of atmospheric sound: the sound of rain and the sound of water boiling in a tea kettle. Munakata's close friendship with the tea ceramicist Kawai Kanjiro and his engagement with the mingei folk craft movement gave him a deep appreciation for the tea ceremony's aesthetic world, and this print suggests that he heard the sound of the tea ceremony's water as a kind of interior rainfall — both sounds registering the same quality of meditative presence.