Boundless Peaks: Ink Paintings by Minol Araki

Renowned as an industrial designer, Minol Araki (1928–2010) was also a prolific painter with a firm grounding in East Asian painting traditions. Born in China to Japanese parents, and active professionally in New York and Taipei, Araki created an immense body of ink paintings that reimagined tradition and straddled East and West.

This exhibition is organized around five mid-career, large-scale works—monumental compositions, each of which stretches more than 70 feet—depicting landscapes, dragons, snow monkeys, and lotus ponds. 

Each painting is complemented by early and late works that marry influences as disparate as the eccentric Chinese painter Bada Shanren (c. 1626–1705), the Lithuanian-American artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Araki’s mentor, the renowned Chinese traditionalist painter Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), and medieval Japanese Zen painters.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

IMAGE: Minol Araki, Japanese, 1928–2010. Yangming Mountains, 1999. Pair of panels; ink and color on paper. Gift of the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture