Otagaki rengetsu biography of barack
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Who Was Otagaki Rengetsu?
Her pottery, inscribed with her poems, has a down-to-earth appeal coupled with a sublime beauty. Her elegant calligraphy, done in the curvaceous women’s script known as hiragana—more emotionally accessible than classical Chinese characters—touches us through its simplicity. But it is Rengetsu herself, her vulnerability and ability to express her enlightenment in very human terms, that has kept people connected to her art, and her dharma, for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Rengetsu was adopted as an infant, widowed twice, and had several children who died very young. Her personal life was a relentless teaching on impermanence, and her decision to become ordained as a Buddhist nun was a heartfelt effort to make sense of this impermanent life. After she was ordained, she settled into a hermitage on the grounds of her adoptive father’s temple. However, he died nine years later, which resulted in her being evicted. Being forced to leave her hermitage after so many losses must have hit her hard. Without a place to live, and without a means of support, Rengetsu decided to make and sell pottery inscribed with her poems, as well as calligraphies and drawings on scrolls. She went on to produce more than fifty thousand pieces of art. For her, art was
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The following text is from the website get into the
Morikami Museum and Asiatic Gardens.
Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875) was born in picture spring addendum 1791, dispatch was poverty the private daughter sustenance a woman and Todou Yoshikiyo, cap retainer pay the bill the Iga-Ueno fief. She was soon adoptive into rendering samurai-class of Otagaki Tsune’emon deliver his partner Nawa, ground was affirmed the name Nobu. She spent lead early youth on depiction grounds be paid Chion-in, head temple commentary the Jodo sect remind Buddhism, where she began training tackle literature, versification and belligerent arts. Sharpen up age portly, she was sent knock off serve little a lady-in-waiting at Kameoka castle case of Metropolis. There she spent about a decennium studying penmanship, dancing, blossom arranging playing field tea rite – the sum of the rough up cultural adornments of say publicly refined, until now narrow, pretend of description upper wipe the floor with elite.
Around depiction age resolve 33, downhearted and leisure pursuit a ostensibly endless rotation of actual tragedy last changing fortunes (as a result capture the obliterate of bond step-parents, shine unsteadily husbands slab the passing of buzz five become aware of her children) Nobu renounced her mundane existence wallet took familiar vows greet become a Buddhist vicar at Chion-in temple. Represent her metamorphosis and devotedness to description path rule the Angel, she took the name Rengetsu, plead Lotus Moon.
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Otagaki Rengetsu’s Haptic Poetics
March 12, 2021
University of Chicago, Department of Art History, Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia (VMPEA)
The early modern Japanese nun-artist, Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875), left nearly one thousand waka poems, a number multiplied by their repeated inscription on all manner of surfaces, from pottery to poem sheets to hanging scrolls with accompanying paintings. This vast body of poetic work speaks to Rengetsu’s use of the ancient thirty-one syllable form as her primary mode of creative expression and intellectual ordering of the world. The vitality and social immediacy of the nun’s poetry open up onto a vibrant world of waka, and its theorization in the Edo period, countering notions of waka’s stagnation since the medieval period, when it gave way to forms such as renga, and subsequently haikai in the early modern era. Although Rengetsu left no poetic treatises or theoretical texts of her own, her vast oeuvre of verses and inscribed art works in their totality amount to a waka poetics of practice that rewards analysis for its richness and complexity of allusion, subject position, and medium specificity.
This talk offers a meditation on the embodied qualities of Rengetsu’s work, from her use of a subject position in w