Ash-laden smoke spewing high and magma flowing fast as the Unzen Volcano in Japan had its great eruption in June of 2001.

Amid the eruption Akira Kaho, Japanese master of ink art, ventured above the mouth in a helicopter to sketch drawings.

Qutang Qingqu (Charm of the Qutang Gorge), ink on paper, by Akira Kaho (1988). [File photo]

"What I want to see more than heaven is hell," he said.

Akira is holding a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing until next Monday.

Hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Culture, the exhibition features 100 ink landscapes , 50 scenes set in China and 50 of Japan.

Visitors say they are touched by the artists' devotion to the pursuit of a spiritual world.

"I am really shocked by his serious attitude toward creation. Beyond fame, beyond money, this is what the word 'artist' means," said Peng Wei, a Beijing art editor.

Unlike Chinese ink paintings, Akira's works depend more on the washing effects of water than lining with ink. It creates a sense of a dreamy mood, said Yang Lizhou, director of the museum.

"While Chinese landscapes are often large works of grandeur, Japanese paintings are often delicate in touch, small in size and amiable," said Uchiyama Takeo, director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, who is visiting China with Akira.

"The works show how ink paintings developed into a different style after the art spread to Japan a millennium ago," he said.

The ink painting, which originated in China, evolved in Japan during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) after the Chinese monk Jianzhen (AD 688-763) sailed to the country and taught Chinese culture there. It was called "Han painting" then.

Ink paintings were widely practiced by Japanese artists until after World War II (1937-45), when Western art began to prevail in the country.

Catering to the booming art market, artists are enthusiastic today about paintings with strong colours and impressive visual effects, which are more decorative than the ink art. Ink paintings have been neglected, said Uchiyama.

But Akira is addicted to ink.

"It's hard to master it. You can easily know the shape of colours, but ink changes with the day and never obeys you. It is because of this that ink painting is interesting," said Akira.

"Ink to me is a drug."

Akira enters his studio in Kyoto with the sunrise every day when he doesn't travel, and won't leave until the evening. "I paint dozens of works a day but I am rarely satisfied with even one," he said.

"It's really labour-consuming when you concentrate first on drawing, and then seeing the ink. You won't know the effect until the ink dries. It's like firing the ceramics.

"No changes can be made once the ink dries. What's it called in English? 'You have given the final word,'" the artist said with a smile.

Akira's black-and-white art world, which may seem too hazy for many Chinese visitors at first glance, has an elegant inner power with its simple beauty. It calms visitors as they enter the exhibition hall and then excites them.

"My blood pressure has risen in the past week. It has been my wish since youth to exhibit my works in the homeland of ink paintings, and I don't know what effect will be achieved," said Akira.

The 50 Chinese landscapes on show have been drawn in the past 30 years based on the artist's 38 sketching tours to China.

Most of the scenes depicted, such as Zhangjiajie in Central China's Hunan Province and parts of the Three Gorges, were undeveloped and almost inaccessible when he drew the sketches.

"I thought it was an easy job to accompany an artist in a sketching tour, but it turned out to be an adventure," said Zhang Aiping, a Chinese Ministry of Culture official who was Akira's translator on one of his tours to China in the 1980s.

"The charm of nature can run away at a glimpse if you cannot catch it. Common sketching is useless. You have to carve your impressions and feelings in your mind," said Akira about his tours.

"Akira follows his feelings instead of any teacher. The style has influenced many young Japanese artists," said Fukuyi Tamio, director of the Toyama Ink Art Museum in Japan, who studies the art of Akira.

Fukuyi, who came to China with Akira, said the artist's "rebel" style might have resulted from the cruel nature of the mountainous Toyoma County where Akira grew up.

Born to a farming family in 1927, Akira has always been sorry he chose to be an artist rather than shoulder the responsibility of farming for the family, as its only surviving son.

He started painting at 11 because painting was "the only way for the sensitive boy to show his existence in a family of eight children,"and also because he saw his art-loving grandfather often treat travelling artists with banquets and geishas.

"He believed it was good to be an artist," said Fukuyi.

Though talented, Akira was refused by all art schools because he wouldn't attend the military training required of all Japanese youths from 1941 to 1945. The artistic-type boy thought the training "useless," and, what's more, he never managed to throw a grenade a safe distance.

In 1944 he left his family to visit Kyoto, the traditional art centre of Japan. Until early 1950s, he slept with the unemployed in the streets, and with impoverished porters along the harbour-front.

"I was more interested in the negative side of life in my youth. We often drank together in the evenings and people were very good to me. It is a pleasant memory," the artist said.

At 23, Akira impressed the Japanese art circle in a national exhibition with a Japanese painting entitled, "Scenery of the Harbour."

His works in the period were filled with the expectations of a young man from the rural area of the snowy northern Japan to the capital city, along with a light sadness, said Fukuyi.

His manly style was full of vitality, and won him acclaim but was hardly accepted by the Japanese art circle, which maintained a favour for gracefulness, refined and slender touches and depictions of such objects as flowers, birds, and the moon.

In 1988 Akira, who by then had national influence, broke away from mainstream national exhibitions to "rediscover Chinese landscapes full of power and grandeur," said Fukuyi.

From 1983 to 1990 the artist had seven solo exhibitions in Japan featuring Chinese landscapes and won applause. After 1997, he published his Japanese landscape series.

"The recent landscapes showed Akira had broken away from the orientation for elegance of the traditional Japanese paintings, and marked a new era for Japanese ink paintings with a spiritual pursuit," said Fukuyi.

At 76 Akira is still questioning himself on the "limits" of his art.

"With familiar subjects and a fresh expression, I believe Akira's works displayed at the museum here will impress Chinese visitors and mark an important event in the Sino-Japan cultural exchange," Sun Jiazheng, Chinese minister of culture, said in his letter of congratulations upon the opening of the exhibition.

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