Sesson Shukei is a towering figure in the world of medieval Japanese ink painting. And yet, very little is known about his life. Most family records have vanished. Letters from his hand have disappeared. Entire decades of his existence are a complete blank. Only after 1546, when Sesson had already entered middle age, are we able to sketch the contours of his activities with some degree of confidence.
As if this were not enough, the fog surrounding his life thickened in the early 2000s, when two Japanese scholars demonstrated that “Advice to Students,” a treatise until then believed to have been authored by Sesson, was in fact an early 19th-century forgery. This caused quite a stir: For decades, art historian Yukio Lippit explains, scholars had “imagined Sesson through the prism of this text.” A wide range of interpretations now had to be revised, if not entirely thrown out.