Abstract

In the decades after the end of the Second World War, a resurgence of interest in East Asian philosophical perspectives and aesthetics impacted the development of Australian abstraction. A select group of artists, including Stanislaus Rapotec, Yvonne Audette, Peter Upward, Royston Harpur, John Olsen, Henry Šalkauskas, and Ian Fairweather, participated in a transcultural twentieth-century dialogue, embracing Japanese Zen Buddhist philosophy—based on the teachings of Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki—and exploring the relationship between abstraction and Zen aesthetics. This article examines how these postwar Australian painters engaged the calligraphic image in abstraction to express the Zen characteristics of simplicity, spontaneity, naturalness, orderliness, harmony, precision, imperfection, and self-reflection and investigate the paradoxical concepts of Zen Buddhist philosophy—specifically, the Absolute Void, the Zen sense of the Alone, and the state of “being-becoming”—in their quest to attain “satori” (“sudden enlightenment”). In the process, they liberated themselves from the conformist restrictions of modernism and created art of a universal nature based on spiritual self-awareness and freedom of artistic expression.