森田子龍
1912–1998
The calligrapher who brought Japanese calligraphy into postwar international art.
Run by the artist’s family, the estate cares for his work and shares it with museums and galleries in Japan and abroad.
Morita Shiryū (1912–1998) was a calligrapher born in Toyooka, Hyogo Prefecture. A student of Ueda Sōkyū, he stood at the forefront of the postwar effort to rethink sho, Japanese calligraphy, as a contemporary art.
In 1951 he founded the journal Bokubi. The following year he and four fellow calligraphers, among them Inoue Yūichi, met at Ryōanji in Kyoto and formed the Bokujinkai. In the pages of Sho no Bi and Bokubi he introduced Western abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages, creating a meeting ground for calligraphy and abstraction. His work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the São Paulo Biennial, among many other venues, and sho took its place in the international art of the postwar years.
Morita never left the written character behind. His subject was the movement of the brush and the time and space it opens on the page. Urushi-kin, his own technique of gold strokes on a black ground, grew out of that pursuit.
“‘East–West exchange’ is first among the important themes of my work.”
「『東西の交流』は私の仕事の重要テーマの第一」
A list of works available for acquisition or loan, with images, dimensions and provenance, is shared individually on request.
Request the list of worksOctober 20, 2026 – February 23, 2027
Collection Exhibition II, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe
The museum’s collection exhibition on the avant-garde in Japanese art. In the first half of the run, through December 13, Gallery 6 shows Japanese-style painting and calligraphy on the theme.
Exhibition detailsOctober 1–15, 2026
Nagai Art Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo
Copies of classical masterpieces, or rinsho, set beside original works by Ueda Sōkyū, Uno Sesson, Morita Shiryū and Inoue Yūichi. Morita is represented by a 1984 copy of the Kenchū Kokushin Jō and Mai (1969). With a talk on October 3.
Exhibition detailsSeptember 25, 2026
Pre-opening
TOYOOKA1925, Toyooka, Hyogo
A gallery in Morita’s hometown showing previously unexhibited works and personal effects from the City of Toyooka’s collection, on the second floor of a hotel in a landmark former bank building.
About the galleryMay 30 – July 4, 2026
Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Ginza, Tokyo
Two avant-garde calligraphers, both born in 1912, seen through their affinities and contrasts.
Exhibition page, Tokyo GalleryMarch 16 – May 19, 2024
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe
A two-person exhibition with the French painter, in dialogue with Morita since the 1950s. Some thirty of Morita’s works were brought together for the first time in about three decades.
Exhibition report, Tokyo Art Beat (in Japanese)2020
Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer. Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2020. 193 pages.
The first English-language book on the postwar history of Japanese calligraphy. It centers on the Bokujinkai, formed in Kyoto in 1952 by Morita Shiryū and four fellow calligraphers, and on the part calligraphy played in the international avant-garde after the war.
Scholarship has mostly framed the postwar exchange in abstract art as a dialogue between European and American abstract painters on one side and Japanese abstract painters, most often those of the Gutai group, on the other. The book argues that the exchange was in fact three-sided, with calligraphers taking part as equals: a fact plain at the time that later dropped from view.
It also traces how calligraphy, though held to be incommensurable with Eurocentric modernism and untranslatable abroad, changed how visual art itself was understood in the first postwar decades, and widened its horizon.
Publisher’s page, BrillFor museums and galleries
We welcome inquiries about acquiring works, borrowing them for exhibitions, and working together on research or publications. We correspond in Japanese and English.
contact@shiryumorita.org