Lotus in Autumn

Seedpods hang from the tips of frail, bent stems in this wildly brushed painting by the female artist Okuhara Seiko. Sensationalized during her lifetime for cropping her hair and wearing male clothing, Seiko’s Chinese-style ink paintings were hugely popular in the years immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Although her uninhibited style seems to speak to a modern individualistic sensibility, Seiko rooted her practice in the study of historical Chinese models. She underlines her identity as a scholar-recluse by inscribing a Chinese poem about the pleasures of drifting in a boat among lotuses under a moonlit sky. Her erratic wet-dry brushstrokes capture the messy decay of the autumnal lotuses, surrounding the viewer so that she, too, is among the stems.