Haboku

1979, John M. Rosenfield & William Jay Rathbun, Song of the Brush: Japanese paintings from the Sansō Collection, Seattle Art Museum The haboku idiom had appeared in South China in the thirteenth century, and appealed greatly to visiting Japanese Zen Buddhists, who took examples back with them.

In the very year that the Void began in Kyoto, a Zen monk named Sesshu (1420-1506) left for Ming China and brought back to Japan haboku, or splash ink style and a love of wide open spaces in his paintings. […] Haboku reached its zenith during the Muromachi Period (1470–1550) and then declined.

His most dramatic works are in the splashed-ink (haboku) style, a technique with Chinese roots. The painter of a haboku picture paused to visualize the image, loaded the brush with ink, and then applied primarily broad, rapid strokes, sometimes even dripping the ink onto the paper.