Shrimps

Description

Qi Baishi, a self-taught artist known for his innovative approach to painting, is one of China’s preeminent twentieth-century ink painters. While most contemporary painters in the centuries-old literati (amateur scholar-artist) tradition presented lofty ideas through conventional depictions of landscapes, pine trees, and bamboo, Qi insisted on painting things close to his own experience, including objects and animals associated with the lives of farmers. He made full-scale paintings of rakes and brooms, freshwater shrimp in a rice paddy, newborn chicks in the farmyard,
and corn on the stalk—lowly subjects that had seldom appeared in the literati repertoire. His highly abbreviated brushwork, rich ink e ects, and unusual compositions lifted these subjects to the heights of literati art and made this highly re ned and intellectualized tradition accessible to
a larger audience.