Twaalf tekens van de dierenriem door Seiho 1900 - 1915

This is Takeuchi Seihô’s “Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”, and looking at the marks, I can just imagine the artist carefully building the layers, shifting back and forth, until they feel just right. There's a confidence here, I feel it. The artist is deeply invested in the work and has such a strong sense of how to translate the twelve signs into the written word, it’s about the process of trying, and then the joy of discovering something. You can see the physicality of the brushstrokes. It’s almost like a dance between intention and chance, between the artist’s will and the ink’s own desire. I love to think about how artists across time engage in a kind of call and response, picking up on ideas and pushing them further. It's like this piece is in conversation with other works, and how it inspires us to keep the dialogue going. The zodiac signs are imbued with so much feeling, it reminds us that art is a way to embrace uncertainty, that there are many ways to see and experience the world.