Hitomaro 

Curator: Looking at this striking ink drawing titled “Hitomaro,” made by Hakuin Ekaku, one immediately notices the confident brushstrokes and the sense of immediacy. It feels less like a formal portrait and more like a captured moment. What do you make of it at first glance? Editor: There’s an arresting vitality in its lines. It is raw, capturing, and a kind of gestural power I often see lacking in more rendered portraits. There's an incredible personality bursting through. It feels very intimate, almost a glimpse behind a constructed persona. Curator: It is interesting to consider that Hakuin's focus was not simply capturing a likeness but conveying a spiritual state or philosophical concept. While named “Hitomaro," suggesting a portrait of the renowned Japanese poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the essence here seems to transcend mere representation. Editor: It makes me consider representation, and how through the visual flattening afforded through this type of line drawing, there's a democratization occurring. We lose hyper-specificity of race, which historically allows more insidious forms of power to perpetuate... Through abstraction, who does this man represent? Curator: Indeed. Ink drawings were integral to Zen practice, and portraits within this tradition were less about outward appearance and more about inward character and enlightenment. It functioned within a precise cultural framework. Editor: So much of what appears radical often is entrenched in those cultural norms. In thinking about enlightenment, then, where and for whom is that even a possibility? When viewing art, I want to reconcile that cultural function with what meaning and new interpretations we can make today. Curator: And isn’t that constant renegotiation precisely where art history thrives—recognizing both the historical forces that shaped creation and the contemporary lenses that continually reshape its meaning? Editor: Precisely! It is why art matters, offering us this critical discourse across time. This piece seems an open invitation into just that sort of conversation.