A brush with some design

I was feeling down about having chosen a bloody difficult language as my potential new career. I guess negative thoughts about not passing my stupid finals have started circulating in my head.
So to cut off this dangerous spiral I went to the Idemitsu Art Gallery in Hibiya in central Tokyo. They're holding an exhibition at the moment called 'Calligraphy and Design.'
It was a fantastic collection and reinvigorated my passion for trying to study and make a life using Japanese in its endless beauty.
Calligraphy developed in China around 2000 BC with pictograms (an image representing something you can see in the real world), ideograms (an image representing an abstract idea), and characters which combine both pictogrammatic and ideogrammatic aspects.
These Chinese characters took off in Japan in the Heian Period more than one thousand years ago. Moreover the Japanese added their own native scripts, the two kana alphabets (which represent syllabic sounds) to their calligraphy. This gave an even wider scope fro expression and created what the exhibitors called 'a very Japanese aesthetic.'
To be honest, a lot of the works were way out of my league. You need to know ancient Japanese and understand how the writer deforms the standard character lines to create more artistic expression.
But one or two pieces really stood out and impressed me.
One was called 'ゆき' (Yuki - Snow) and was written / designed by the calligrapher Aoki Koryu. I've been searching madly on the net for a picture of it, but to no avail. If you can imagine a two metre squared white canvass on which the calligrapher has written a poem in black ink. The poem is by Kusano Shinpei and reads simply:
しんしんしん　ゆき　ふりつもる
(shinshinshin yuki furitsumoru - new new new snow falling and covering the ground).
The artist has arranged the characters in such a way that you can really see snow. You feel the silence. You imagine the snow sitting heavily on branches. You feel the cold clumps and soft flakes. It is pure and elegant and clean. As the organisers said - a very Japanese aesthetic.
The other piece I liked was called '草原' (Sogen - Meadow). It was the ancient character for grass repeated over and over again to look like a dot matrix picture of a meadow. You know like where somebody does a protrait of someone on their PC using only exes and question marks and the like. This was done in 1963 before any home printers so I guess the moral is that there's nothing new under the sun.
Anyway I felt really charged after the show and am ready to take on Japanese again full force. Pass or fail in February - who cares!