Season for Harvesting Barley

Early summer… One word to describe this season, bakushū, is written in Japanese with two characters meaning “barley autumn.” As the characters suggest, early summer is the season for harvesting barley. During this season of abundance, the world seems to stretch quietly on and on… In this painting, the farmhouse is placed diagonally across the bottom of the vertical space of the scroll, and we peek into it from above. Most of the painting is in dark black ink. Apart from that, there are only a few spots of color, such as the blue of the boy’s kimono and the yellow of the mats in front of the house. In this work, the artist Kobayashi Kokei has depicted a world of reticence and perfect harmony. Neither the world in the painting nor the painting itself seems to want for anything. Modern paintings in Japanese style are often criticized as being devoid of content. Kokei’s painting seems to challenge us by asking where one would find content if not in color and form. A harmonious world where everything seems to resonate quietly with everything else… In the real world, we try so hard to find such places but are unable to do so. Perhaps such worlds exist only in paintings.