Taikobo (Jiang Ziya)

Shohaku was a skilled ink painter during an era bursting with creativity: his contemporaries in Kyoto were Ito Jakuchu, Maruyama Okyo and Ike Taiga, among others. They seem tame in comparison. Very little is known of Shohaku’s biography, but he is thought to have been from a merchant family in Kyoto and he died at the age of fifty-two. He is described as very odd and bohemian in his behavior, a madman, frequently drunk and generally disrespectful of authority. However, he may have secretly delighted in playing the misfit. His work fell out of favor in Japan but was rediscovered and appreciated at the end of the nineteenth century by Americans living in Japan such as William Sturgis Bigelow. The largest collection of his paintings—over fifty—is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the artist’s monumental and grotesque Dragon in Clouds recently emerged from storage and caught the attention of the artist Takashi Murakami.