Sesshu's Splashed Ink Landscape

Sesshu Toyo, ink painting, 1495

From "Japanese Aesthetics," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"The mysterious grace of [Seshu's] most celebrated landscape painting derives as much from the space that is left un-touched, the invisible and absent (often referred to as the 'dragon’s veins' of a painting) as from what is painted and visible. The work appears incomplete, still in the act of formation, and the dramatic negative spaces created by the mists allow the various forms to dissolve and blend into one another, but more decisively, according to the yūgen dynamic, this negativity invites the viewer into the painting to actively complete it. As artists employing yūgen principles in other genres have shown, the incompleteness and allusiveness of the artwork summons the viewer into the scene. In Ghilardi’s words, 'the onlooker must merge in the image, completing the empty spaces, making it a lively element of nature itself, "between" visible and invisible'" (Ghilardi, 2015, 99).