Sōami

Sōami, also called Shinsō, (born 1472, Japan—died 1525, Japan), Japanese painter, art critic, poet, landscape gardener, and master of the tea ceremony, incense ceremony, and flower arrangement who is an outstanding figure in the history of Japanese aesthetics.

Sōami was the grandson and son of the painters and art connoisseurs Nōami and Geiami, respectively, and like them was in charge of the art collection of the Ashikaga shoguns (military dictators of the Ashikaga clan that ruled Japan from 1338 to 1573).

Sōami’s work was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Zen, the meditative sect of Buddhism that taught that secular art forms can serve as a means of attaining spiritual enlightenment. As a painter, he preferred the soft ink-wash style of Mu-ch’i Fa-ch’ang, a 13th-century Chinese Zen painter greatly admired in Japan, and he painted a fine set of landscape fusuma-e (paintings done on sliding doors) in the Daisen-in, a monastery within the Zen Buddhist Daitoku Temple in Kyōto. As a critic, in 1511 he revised Nōami’s famous catalog of Chinese paintings, the Kundaikan sayū chōki (compiled in 1476). As a landscape gardener, he designed two of the most celebrated Zen temple gardens in Japan: the Ryōan Temple garden, in Kyōto, an outstanding example of kare sansui, a dry landscape technique in which combinations of stones and sand are used to suggest mountains and water; and the Daisei-in garden, a miniature reproduction of a natural landscape, also in the kare sansui style. It is believed that he also planned the garden of the famed Silver Pavilion (Ginkaku Temple) in Kyōto, the villa built by his major patron, Ashikaga Yoshimasa.