Critical Zen art history

Abstract

This essay sketches a history of the study of Zen art from the late nineteenth century to post-war reconsiderations, leading towards what I term “critical Zen art studies.” The latter, I suggest, has been undertaken by historians of art and others to challenge normative definitions of Zen art based on modern constructs, revise understanding of the types and functions of visual art important to Chan/Sŏn/Zen Buddhist monasteries, and study iconographies and forms not as a transparent aesthetic indices to Zen Mind or No Mind but as rhetorically, ritually, and socially complex, even unruly, events of representation.

Keywords

• Zen
• Buddhism
• art
• visual culture
• Sesshū
• Buddhist modernism
• transcendentalism
• post-war