At the end of the Edo Period (1603-1868), as Japan began to change its long-held cultural reference point from China to the West, a strong Sinophile interest was maintained by the nation's cultural and political elites. From the late 19th century, however, the cultural reorientation to the West had deleterious effects upon the reception of calligraphy, which had been held by the Chinese literati tradition as an art form equal to painting and poetry.

Its status was seriously called into question by an 1882 article titled "Calligraphy is not an art" by the Western-style painter Koyama Shotaro. And even though the pioneer of Japanese art history, Okakura Tenshin, published a rebuttal arguing for an "Eastern perspective," the triumph of Western conceptions of fine art left calligraphy marginalized.

The Chinese calligraphic tradition that was still enthusiastically received by an elite group of Japanese is the subject of Kyoto National Museum's "Spirit of Brush and Ink: The World of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphies." Though the works are from the collection of Riichi Ueno (1848-1919), one of the founders of the Asahi Shimbun, it was assembled by the renowned Chinese scholar and philologist Luo Zhenyu (1866-1940), who took refuge in Kyoto from 1911-1919 following China's Xinhai Revolution of 1911. The East Asian scholar Naito Konan (1866-1934) facilitated the exchange and now the works form the core of Kyoto National Museum's collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy.