Japanese Portrait of a Man, 1502

Caption reads, Sesshu (1420-1506)? Daruma 1502. [Image: black & white print on yellowed paper of a very old Japanese ink painting of the head and shoulders of a man. Tall vertical format with his face halfway down the page and empty space above. His clothes are painted with a few thick rough brushstrokes while his head is painted in thin whispy lines. He is balding and has a beard and saggy, bushy eyebrows. His neck is wrinkly and his eyes bulge out and look sidelong at the viewer.]

Found this old German photogravure of a Japanese print for sale here.

Oorutaichi

The blog Contemporary Japanese Art has a post about Japanese musician & performer Oorutaichi that's worth a look. They describe him as performing, "his own progressive form of ‘drifting folklore music’ combining elements of dance, folk and pop. Singing with a palpable joy in his own invented language, while at the same time mashing and mixing driving base-lines with disco-kicks and synthesized freestyle beats." The second video is probably a good description of an annoying circular dream experience I have a lot, where you're trying to do something and all these obstacles come up that you have to deal with but you're never really done, just on a loop. Anyway, I think it's funny that "folk" can be this digitally sophisticated but I guess that's an honest description for someone that age in Japan in 2011, with "folk" being the flip-side of terms like, "crowd-sourcing," "networking," "DIY/guerrilla," etc.





Here's what this looks like live: