Tawara Yūsaku and Your Moment of Zen

For many Americans a “moment of Zen” is the segment that ends every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Those brief glimpses of contemporary life usually reprise an earlier bit from the show and are meant to resonate in your head—to literally hum or buzz on some frequency to which words cannot reach in abstract, spiritual sense. A different kind of “moment of Zen” is happening at the Indianapolis Museum of Art with the exhibition Universe Is Flux: The Art of Tawara Yūsaku, which runs through April 1, 2012. As the IMA’s curator John Teramoto explains in this video and in catalog to the exhibition, Tawara’s images “seem to float ethereally in their own separate cosmos, and at times they seem to morph or vibrate before our eyes.” What seem to be single strokes are actually countless strokes intricately built up into an image. When you make that realization, Tawara’s art shakes you up and buzzes through what you thought you knew about art. Between Tawara’s fascinating personal story and even more fascinating Eastern perspective on Western art, Universe Is Flux will be “a moment of Zen” that may last you a lifetime. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Tawara Yūsaku and Your Moment of Zen."

[Image: Tawara Yūsaku, Japanese (1932-2004), Koga wo omoute (Thinking of Old Masters) 7, 1997, ink on paper, 6 3/8 x 9 1/2 in. (image). Loan from Mrs. Kayoko Okada.]

[Many thanks to the University of Washington Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to and to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition Universe Is Flux: The Art of Tawara Yūsaku, which runs through April 1, 2012. You can see the IMA’s curator John Teramoto talk about Tawara Yūsaku and this exhibition here.]