A large carved-character work shown at last year’s Osaka-Kansai Expo is now on view in the Mainichi Shodokai show window on the first floor of the Palaceside Building. “people 歓喜” (1 m × 2.4 m), created for the Expo by Tosen Usuda, chair of the Japan Carved-Character Association, expresses people’s joy in vivid blue.
Usuda, head priest of Enmeiji of the Soto school, was born in Niigata City in 1948. He studied under Seiu Aoyama and Yoseki Cho. He received the Mainichi Calligraphy Commendation in 2009 and the Niigata Prefecture Cultural Meritorious Service Award in 2011. He serves as a director of the Mainichi Shodokai. Carved-character art transfers the artist’s own writing onto a board, carves it, and applies color. “People” is a lifelong series for Usuda, based on the Dongba pictograph for “person” transmitted in Yunnan, China, and elsewhere.
The work was shown as an invited piece at “Tradition in White and Black: The Worlds of Calligraphy and Go,” presented by The Mainichi Newspapers at the Osaka-Kansai Expo in June. The display in the Mainichi Shodokai window runs through the 30th of this month.