Chaos

Matsubara, who grew up in a temple, decided to paint this story while he was mourning the death of his teacher, Inoue Sankō. In Chaos, he rid himself of the urge to stay faithful to his teacher’s style and to pursue his own interest in depicting sound, as captured in the circles that cover the surface of the screens. The repetitive circles evoke the reverberations of the singing bowl, a sound commonly heard in a Japanese temple. Like the writhing figures in the screen, Matsubara struggled through the white path to emerge confident about his own ideas about painting.