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[email protected] Tel. Direct +41 (0)44 415 31 27 Press Release Zen Master Sengai (1750–1837) May 18–August 10, 2014 For the first time in over half a century, forty of Zen master Sengai’s most famous works are to go on show in Zurich in a special exhibition to mark 150 years of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan. The light-sensitive paintings that will be on view to the public in two, six- week-long series come from the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, which houses the world’s most important collection of ink paintings and calligraphy by Sengai Gibon. Visitors will thus have a unique opportunity to rediscover the multifaceted legacy of this great Zen master and highly idiosyncratic artist. Sengai Gibon was abbot of Japan’s oldest Zen monastery, built in 1195. At the age of sixty-two, he resigned as abbot in order to devote himself exclusively to painting and calligraphy, which he used for teaching Zen to his pupils. He saw his art as a way of helping people—even very simple people—to understand Zen Buddhism. And a large part of his output does indeed belong to the genre called zenkizu, or “Zen assistance paintings.” Compared with medieval Zen painting, whose masterful brushwork reminds us of the semi-professional status of many of the painter-monks of the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, some of Sengai’s paintings radiate an almost childlike insouciance.