Japanese Art and Hishida Shunsō: Fleeting Life and Birds

Japanese Art and Hishida Shunsō: Fleeting Life and Birds

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

The luminous painter Hishida Shunsō (1874–1911) belongs to the final, restless decades of the Meiji era, a time when Japan itself was searching for a new soul between tradition and modernity. His life, like his brush, burned quickly and brightly. Death came for him at only thirty-six, leaving behind not closure, but a haunting question: what further worlds might he have painted, had time been kinder?