Zheng Xie

Zheng Xie a Chinese painter, poet and official of the Qing dynasty (1693-1765), one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou and the most famous painter of bamboo in the history of Chinese art. A magistrate who resigned his post in protest at injustice, he became a scholar-artist of strong moral convictions whose paintings expressed the integrity he prized in life.

Early Life and Scholar-Official Career

Zheng Xie was born in 1693 in Xinghua, in the province of Jiangsu, into a family of poor scholars. His father was a teacher, and the household was learned but impoverished. He studied hard under difficult circumstances and pursued the examination career, succeeding only after many years and several failures, a struggle that gave him great sympathy for the poor and the unsuccessful.

He eventually passed the highest examinations and obtained the degree of jinshi, and he was appointed to a series of magistracies, first in Shandong province. He served as a county magistrate with a reputation for honesty, frugality and concern for the welfare of the common people, and he took his duties seriously at a time when many officials regarded office chiefly as an opportunity for profit.

His most famous act was his response to a famine that struck his district. He opened the government granaries to feed the starving without waiting for the cumbersome permission of his superiors, and he pressed for relief for those who had lost everything. The episode illustrated his conviction that the welfare of the people came before the forms of official procedure.

Resignation and the Move to Yangzhou

His refusal to bow to the interests of powerful local families and his blunt criticism of abuses made him enemies, and he was eventually dismissed from office, or resigned in protest, in the 1750s. The poems and letters he wrote at this time express his disgust with the corruption of the bureaucracy and his determination to preserve his integrity.

He returned to the life of a scholar and an artist, settling at Yangzhou, the great commercial city whose markets for painting would support him for the rest of his life. There he joined the circle of individualist artists known as the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, and he supported himself by selling his paintings, calligraphy and poems.

The transition from official to professional artist was a decisive change in his life. It freed him from the constraints of office and allowed him to paint as he wished, and it brought him into contact with the merchants, scholars and collectors who made up the art market of the city. His fame as a painter grew rapidly, and his works were much in demand.

Bamboo, Orchid and Ink Painting

Zheng Xie is celebrated above all for his paintings of bamboo. He painted it throughout his life and in enormous quantity, and he made it the vehicle of his deepest feelings. His bamboo is drawn with bold, swift strokes of dark ink, and the plant's resilience and uprightness served him as an emblem of the moral character of the gentleman.

He also painted orchids, rocks and chrysanthemums, the traditional subjects of the scholar-painter, and he treated them with the same force and simplicity. He wrote that he painted not to please the eye but to express his own spirit, and his works are valued for the directness with which they communicate the mood of the painter.

His technical innovations in ink painting were considerable. He used a wet brush and rapid movement to create bamboo leaves and stems that seem to be swept into being by a single impulse, and his use of empty space gives his compositions a spare and powerful elegance. The apparent ease of his brushwork conceals long practice and firm control.

Poetry, Calligraphy and Writings

Zheng Xie was a poet and calligrapher as well as a painter, and the three arts were for him a single discipline. He wrote poems on many subjects, including the sorrows of the poor, the follies of the powerful and the pleasures of a simple life, and his verse is direct, vigorous and often sharply satirical.

His calligraphy, which he called by the name of a distinctive script of his own devising, mixed the running, cursive and clerical manners into a personal style of great liveliness. He inscribed his own poems on many of his paintings, so that image, verse and written character are unified in a single work, as the scholarly tradition prescribed.

He also left a body of prose and prefaces, including a famous set of colophons on his own bamboo paintings in which he explained his methods and his ideas about art. These writings, plain, forceful and full of personality, are among the most attractive documents of Qing artistic thought and give a clear picture of his character and opinions.

Influence and Legacy

Zheng Xie died in 1765 at Xinghua, leaving a vast number of paintings, most of them bamboo, and a considerable body of poetry and prose. His works were collected eagerly in his lifetime and have been prized ever since, and he is generally acknowledged as the greatest painter of bamboo in the Chinese tradition.

His reputation rests on more than his art. He became a symbol of the honest official who would rather give up his post than betray the people he governed, and of the artist who would rather paint for himself than flatter the taste of the market. These images of integrity gave his life a moral resonance that has kept his memory alive.

As one of the leading Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou he helped to establish the tradition of independent, expressive painting that would influence the modern period. His bamboo, drawn with such conviction and feeling, remains one of the most recognisable images in Chinese art and an enduring emblem of personal integrity.

See also

• Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou
• Jin Nong
• Luo Pin
• Chinese bamboo painting