Murakami Kagaku

Murakami Kagaku is a nihonga (Japanese-style painting) painter. He co-founded the Kokuga sosaku-kyōkai, a revolutionary artists’ society that fought against the authoritarianism of the Kanten, or the official exhibition, and sought for free artistic expressions. In his late thirties, Kagaku left the art world for recluse in the Rokkosan Mountain. Since then, he had concentrated on sansui (Chinese-style landscape) and Buddhist paintings, both of which possess the qualities of refinement and spirituality, and demonstrate the artist’s comment, which is ‘art-making is praying in one’s inner room’.