Tian-Yong-Xing Da-Dao:
From the Series of “Shui Hu Zhuan (Water Margin)”

This looks just like a ground trampled all over by a monster. Alternatively, it could be a flood of paint like a sandpit after playing in the mud. Rather than a delicate, small world portrayed with a paintbrush, during the 1960s when this painting was produced, attempts were made to directly express a larger world employing the human body itself as the artistic material.

Kazuo Shiraga laid the canvas on the floor and hanging from a rope attached to the ceiling, he drew on the canvas, where the paint was placed, with his feet like Tarzan. It was indeed a martial art. Having said so, the essence of this painting is not the record of a past action but the wonder of the bulge of paint, which could not be expressed with the conventional paintbrush, and the blending of colors woven in red, black, and white.

The title is taken from the name of a character in Shui Hu Zhuan (Water Margin).