Shrimps
Shrimps swim across bare paper, painted with just a few brushstrokes. Qi Baishi kept live shrimps in order to study them.
The translucency: paler ink for the body, dark strokes for the head.
Qi Baishi was born in 1864 into a poor farming family in Hunan Province and first worked as a carpenter and woodcarver. He taught himself to paint by copying models and eventually became one of the best-known Chinese artists of the 20th century. He moved to Beijing around 1917 and lived there for the rest of his life. He died in 1957, aged over ninety.
Shrimps were one of Qi Baishi’s favourite subjects, and he painted them many times. The picture shows a few shrimps swimming freely on bare paper. There is no water and no setting. Yet the viewer understands from their movements and placing that they are moving through water. The shrimps are painted at different angles, some facing each other, others heading in different directions.
The composition is airy. The shrimps are placed so that they create movement across the surface, and the bare paper becomes water. The empty space is as important as what is painted. The number of shrimps and the distances between them create rhythm.
Qi Baishi painted in black ink on paper. The body was done in pale, diluted ink so that it looks translucent. The head and eyes are painted in dark ink. The antennae and legs are thin, quick lines. The segments of the body were made by pressing the brush against the paper in a few short strokes. This demanded a very sure hand, since a brushstroke in ink cannot be corrected.
He studied live shrimps, which he kept in a bowl by his desk. Over the years he simplified the way he painted them, removing everything that was not essential. His shrimps from later years are often considered the finest. The style is called xieyi in Chinese, meaning roughly “writing the idea”, in which one captures the essence of the subject rather than its exact appearance. He held that a good picture should lie somewhere between likeness and unlikeness – neither too like nor too unlike what it represents.
Qi Baishi combined traditional Chinese literati painting with popular subjects such as vegetables, insects, fish and crabs. He made art that was both cultivated and accessible. He was also a skilled calligrapher and seal carver. When he came to Beijing, the painter Chen Shizeng encouraged him to renew his style, and he then developed a more personal manner of expression.
Today Qi Baishi is one of China’s best-known artists, and his works have sold for very high sums at auction. His shrimps have become a symbol of Chinese ink painting and appear on postage stamps and in textbooks. He also received international honours during his lifetime.