Bamboo

Bamboo is a subject in art. The gallery holds 154 works in this subject in art, including works by Sesson Shūkei, Qian Xuan and Tesshū Tokusai.

Bamboo (竹) is among the most enduring subjects in East Asian art, where it transcends botanical depiction to embody Confucian moral character. In China it is celebrated as one of the "Four Gentlemen" (alongside the plum blossom, orchid, and chrysanthemum), a set of plant motifs standard since the Song dynasty (960–1279). The evergreen culm—upright, hollow at its core, and able to bend in storms without breaking—became a portrait of the ideal scholar: principled yet humble, resilient yet flexible. Though painters had rendered bamboo since the Tang dynasty, the literati tradition of monochrome "ink bamboo" (mòzhú) crystallized in the eleventh century around Wen Tong (1018–1079), founder of the Huzhou school, and his cousin the poet-statesman Su Shi (1037–1101), whose praise secured Wen's lasting fame.

The genre's defining technique fused painting with calligraphy. Working in black ink alone, the artist "wrote" each stalk and leaf with disciplined, gestural brushstrokes, the leaf clusters resembling characters and the joints articulated like script. Su Shi famously held that the painter must possess the "complete bamboo in the breast" before lifting the brush, executing the image in a single concentrated burst. This expressive mode stood apart from the meticulous court manner—seen in Emperor Huizong's (1082–1135) silk handscroll Finches and Bamboo, a jewel of the realist flower-and-bird painting cultivated at his academy.

The ink-bamboo lineage ran for centuries. Yuan masters such as Li Kan (c. 1245–1320), who studied the plant intensively and compiled a treatise on it, Ke Jiusi (c. 1290–1343), and the reclusive Wu Zhen (1280–1354) refined Wen Tong's idiom; in the Qing dynasty the Yangzhou eccentric Zheng Xie (Zheng Banqiao, 1693–1765) paired it with orchids and rock, as in his handscroll Orchids and Bamboo.

The theme also carried philosophical weight through the legend of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, third-century scholars who withdrew to drink and converse amid bamboo—an emblem of principled retreat that spread across Korea and Japan. Japanese literati (nanga) painters, including Sesson Shūkei and Tokuyama Gyokuran, absorbed the motif, ensuring bamboo's place as a shared visual language of the East Asian scholar's world.