Lasting Stream

Ogata Korin made something of a picnic out of life, but he left great art to posterity. To celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth. Tokyo's Shirokiya department store has put on exhibition 120 of the Japanese master's pictures in the greatest Korin show ever assembled.

Korin inherited a fortune at 30, made several more from his art, and spent them all before his death at 58. He was a philosopher in love with life, knowing and glorying in its evanescence. Once, to dramatize his feeling, he brought plain rice balls, wrapped in bamboo, to a flower-viewing party. After eating, he unrolled the bamboo wrapping upon the air. It was overlaid with gold leaf and painted by himself with mountains, birds and flowers. Casually, he tossed it into the stream.

Kinko Riding a Carp is a reversal of that gesture--not reality drowned but imagination borne upon the stream. The energy of Korin's brush reflects the lightning lift and speed of human imagination, which is capable of almost anything, even of riding on the back of a fish. His art also mirrors Taoist thought, which regards "everything as destroyed and everything as in completion . . . reaching security through chaos.'' Asked where he had got this idea, the sage Nu Yu replied: "I learned it from the Son of Ink. The Son of Ink learned it from the Grandson of Learning. The Grandson of Learning from Understanding, and Understanding from Insight . . ." Korin's art is insight direct.

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