hatsuboku 溌墨

Keywords
Art History
Painting

Ch: pomo. Lit. splashed ink. An ink painting *suibokuga 水墨画 technique in which ink is spattered from the hand, a brush, or other implement to render the feeling of volume and texture of rocks and mountains. The Chinese painter, Wang Mo (Jp: Ō Boku 王墨, ?-ca. 804), is customarily associated with the origins of splashed ink. The technique was first used to depict landscape forms, but it came to be used to render costumes in Zen and Taoist figure painting *dōshakuga 道釈画. Both the splashed ink and broken ink *haboku 破墨 techniques can be read pomo in Chinese, and considerable confusion has arisen over their use in documents. In Japan, these techniques eventually came to refer to one technique of laying on successive ink washes. A hanging scroll of The Broken Ink Landscape Haboku sansui-zu 破墨山水図 by Sesshū Tōyō 雪舟等楊 (1420-1506) in Tokyo National Museum is a well-known example of the splashed ink technique, in spite of its title.