Bada Shanren

Bada Shanren the sobriquet of the Chinese painter and monk Zhu Da (c. 1626-1705), a descendant of the Ming imperial family who became one of the greatest masters of the early Qing dynasty. Renowned for the extraordinary expressiveness of his ink painting of birds, fish and flowers, he created an art of concentrated feeling and bitter elegance that has been admired for more than three centuries.

Imperial Ancestry and Early Life

Zhu Da was born around 1626, a member of the imperial Zhu family that had ruled China since the founding of the Ming dynasty. He was a native of Nanchang, in the province of Jiangxi, and his noble descent gave him an excellent education in the classics, poetry, calligraphy and painting, the accomplishments expected of a prince of the blood.

The fall of the Ming in 1644 and the conquest of China by the Manchus destroyed the standing of his family and placed all its members in danger. Like other loyalists of imperial blood he withdrew from the world, and he eventually entered a Buddhist monastery, where he took the religious name that gave rise to his sobriquet, Bada Shanren, meaning something like the mountain man of the eight greats.

The trauma of the dynastic catastrophe coloured everything he did. The tradition describes him as having feigned madness for a time, and his later behaviour was eccentric and reclusive. Whether or not the stories are literally true, the paintings and poems he left behind are charged with the grief and defiance of a man whose world had been taken from him.

Monastic Life and Personal Style

For some decades Zhu Da lived as a monk and later as a Daoist teacher, moving among the religious communities of Jiangxi. He studied the classics of Buddhism and Daoism, practised calligraphy and poetry, and gradually developed the pictorial manner on which his fame rests. The monastic setting gave him both the leisure and the spiritual detachment in which his art matured.

He was a difficult and solitary man, given to long silences and to sudden outbursts, and the records left by his friends depict a personality of great intensity. He painted for those who understood him and for the small market of connoisseurs whom he was willing to serve, and he had little patience with the ordinary commerce of the art world.

Toward the end of his life he abandoned the monastic life and returned to secular society, living in a modest house near Nanchang and supporting himself by his brush. He painted and sold works, and he seems to have taken pupils, though the intensely personal quality of his art made it difficult for others to follow.

Technique and Expression

The art of Bada Shanren is above all an art of the brush and of the ink. He worked with a few decisive strokes, using a wet and supple brush that could swell and contract within a single mark, and he left large areas of the paper empty so that the void itself became part of the composition. His compositions are daring in their asymmetry and in the tension between painted form and untouched ground.

His favourite subjects were the creatures and plants of the natural world: birds, fish, ducks, cats, rocks, flowers, bamboo and lotus. He drew them with a deceptive simplicity that conceals great technical control, and he gave them an uncanny inner life, so that a bird on a rock or a fish in a stream seems to carry a whole human emotion.

The famous weirdness of his birds, with their hunched shoulders and their staring or averted eyes, has been read as an expression of his political grief and of his contempt for the world that had destroyed his house. Whether or not such readings are pressed too far, the expressive power of these images is undeniable, and they have made him one of the most beloved of all Chinese painters.

Calligraphy, Seals and Poetry

Bada Shanren was a calligrapher of the first rank as well as a painter. His characters, written in a bold and rounded hand, have the same concentrated energy as his painting, and his inscriptions and poems on his own works are an integral part of their design. The close union of painting, poetry and calligraphy in his art places him firmly within the scholarly tradition.

His seals are famous in their own right. He used several personal seals with elaborate and recondite designs, and the marks they made on his paintings are among the most recognisable in Chinese art. Collectors and scholars have paid close attention to the sequence in which these seals were used, since it provides evidence for the dating of his works.

His poems, many of them brief and allusive, share the bitterness and the beauty of his painting. They speak of the lost dynasty, of the vanity of the world and of the consolation of art, and they deepen the emotional resonance of the images they accompany. Together the painting, the calligraphy and the verse form a single expressive whole.

Influence and Legacy

Bada Shanren died around 1705 in Nanchang. His art was little understood by the mass of buyers in his own day, but it was prized by discerning collectors, and its reputation grew steadily in the centuries that followed. Painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially the individualists of the later tradition, looked to him as a model of expressive freedom.

In the twentieth century, when Chinese painters began to study their own tradition in the light of modern ideas of self-expression, Bada Shanren became one of the most admired of all the old masters. His economy of means, his psychological intensity and his mastery of empty space have been compared to the achievements of modern artists, and his work has been exhibited throughout the world.

He is remembered together with Shi Tao as the supreme representative of the expressive current in early Qing painting. His union of technical perfection, emotional depth and political sorrow has made him a symbol of the artist who preserves his integrity in a hostile age, and his images of birds and fish remain among the most powerful in Chinese art.

See also

• Shi Tao
• Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
• Chinese ink painting
• Ming-Qing transition