This is not a Print!
This calligraphy art scroll is created by the disabled
artist.
Approximate Measurements:
Length of Silk Scroll: 48.2" (122cm)
Width of Wooden Scroll Roller: 18.6" (47cm)
Japanese kanji, Traditional or Simplified
Chinese Characters & pinyin
(ザ・ニンジャ)
A class of 14th century
Japanese who were trained in martial arts and were hired for espionage and
assassinations.
Ninja is the on'yomi reading of
the two kanji "忍者". In the native kun'yomi reading, it is read shinobi, a
shortened form of the longer transcription shinobi-no-mono (忍の者). The term
shinobi has been traced as far back as the late 8th century to poems in the
Man'yōshū. The underlying connotation of shinobi (忍) means "to steal away" and —
by extension — "to forbear", hence its association with stealth and
invisibility. Mono (者) means "a person".
Historically, the word ninja
was not in common use, and a variety of regional colloquialisms evolved to
describe what would later be dubbed ninjas. Along with shinobi, some examples
include monomi ("one who sees"), nokizaru ("macaque on the roof"), rappa
("ruffian"), kusa ("grass") and Iga-mono ("one from Iga"). In historical
documents, shinobi is almost always used.
Kunoichi, meaning a female
ninja, supposedly came from the characters くノ一 (pronounced 'ku', 'no' and 'ichi'),
which make up the three strokes that form the kanji for "woman" (女).
In the West, the word ninja
became more prevalent than shinobi in the post-World War II culture, possibly
because it was more comfortable for Western speakers. In English, the plural of
ninja can be either unchanged as ninja, reflecting the Japanese language's lack
of grammatical number, or the regular English plural ninjas.
Talented Disabled
Calligraphy Artists create this 'Ninja' calligraphy painting wall scroll!
When I first saw a person
without hands who could not only write but also became a good calligrapher, I
was shocked.
Disabled artist, Mr. Wang, has sat in a wheelchair more than 30 years after a catastrophic
accident during fieldwork left him paralyzed from the waist down. Master Wang was
gracefully moving and pausing his brush that can be mesmerizing, and there is one
of his artworks on display here.
