Catching a catfish with a gourd
Catching a catfish with a gourd (瓢鮎図, Hyō-nen-zu) is a
Josetsu was born and trained as an artist in China but settled in Japan. He was one of the first suiboku painters working in Japan in the Muromachi period.
Description
This painting in ink on paper depicts an old man in ragged clothes holding out a bottle gourd (hyōtan) beside a narrow winding stream, with a stand of bamboo in the foreground to the left and mountains rising through mist in the background to the right. The man is apparently attempting to catch a catfish (namazu) that is swimming past.
The work was inspired by a riddle set by
Catching a slippery catfish fish with an unsuitable utensil such as a smooth and rounded gourd would be so difficult as to be almost impossible, but illustrates the impossibility of using logical rationalisation to understand
Legacy
The work inspired popular
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Full scroll with inscriptions, 111.5cm high, 75.8cm wide
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Kunisada's print of a monkey, Catching a Catfish with a Gourd (Hyotan namazu), 1857
References
- A Mysterious Painting, Josetsu's Catching a Catfish with a Gourd, Kyoto National Museum
- Hyonenzu “Catching a Catfish with a Gourd” (Ink Painting, National Treasure), taizoin.com
- Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting, Yukio Lippit, pp. 4–9
- From Chinese Chan to Japanese Zen: A Remarkable Century of Transmission and Transformation, Steven Heine, pp. 237–240
- China and Japan through the Artistic Prism of Josetsu: “Catching a Catfish with a Gourd”, Lee Jay Walker, Modern Tokyo Times, 23 May 2015
- Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, Volume 1, edited by Daniel Crump Buchanan, p.15