Episode #75: Art Auction Audacity-- Qi Baishi's Twelve Landscape Screens (Season 8, Episode 7)
In our eighth season, we’re exploring examples of some of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction considering why they garnered so much money, and discovering their backstories. Today: Qi Baishi’s Twelve Landscape Screens.
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Episode Credits:
Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Writing and research help by Arina Novak.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
Additional music credits:
"The Empress of China" by Dee Yan-Key is licensed under BY-NC-ND 4.0; "Stratum (Instrumental)" by Chad Crouch is licensed under BY-NC 3.0; "Hotel Terminus" by Circus Marcus is licensed under BY-NC 4.0; "Mating Silver Crane (ID 280)" by Lobo Loco is licensed under BY-NC-ND 4.0; "Beijing 2008" by Anton Khoryukov is licensed under BY-NC-SA 4.0; "星空 (Starry Sky)" by Julie Maxwell is licensed under BY-ND 4.0. Ads: "Brain Power" by Mela is licensed under BY-SA 4.0 (Bloomberg); "A Perceptible Shift" by Andy G. Cohen is licensed under BY 4.0 (Acorn TV); "Beaches" by Alex Vaan is licensed under BY 4.0 (Kobo); "West in Africa" by John Bartmann is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal (Indeed).
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Links and further resources
Daily Art Magazine: Qi Baishi, China’s Master of the Ordinary in an Extraordinary Way
Artprice.com: Characteristics of the Chinese Art Market in 2016
Artnet: Qi Baishi Just Became the First Chinese Artist to Break the $100 Million Mark at Auction
Mental Floss: The People's Artist: Qi Baishi
Episode Transcript
I’ve said it before on the ArtCurious podcast, but it bears reiterating: I learn a LOT from researching, writing, and producing this show. And I’ve learned a lot from you listeners, too. I’ve learned that a really vocal majority of you were super excited that we covered Artemisia Gentileschi’s graphic masterpiece in its full and semi-autobiographical detail. I learned that many of you love Rosa Bonheur as deeply as I do. And I loved hearing that lots of you were excited to learn about Hokusai’s daughter, the amazing Katsushika Oi, as I was, especially since she was an artist thoroughly unknown to me only a couple of years prior. Well, the same thing has happened here again. For this episode, I was able to dig in and learn all about an amazing artist whose work has become big business for the art market, with a single sale that catapulted this artist into the top 25 most expensive works ever sold.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. This season, season eight, we’re exploring examples of some of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction and considering why they garnered so much money, and you may have noticed that the works that garner the biggest bucks were typically created by dead white guys. These next two episodes are going to toss that narrative out the window, and today we’re going to learn about an artist who was yet another wonderful new surprise for me--and I hope for you, too. This is the story of the most expensive work sold at auction by an Asian artist, Qi Baishi. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
Qi Baishi was an exemplary, traditional Chinese artist who devoted his life to the ritual of the painting craft, an artist self-tasked with modernizing his nation’s painting styles through a whimsical and roughly-sketched manner of working. Though he might not be a familiar name to most Western audiences, Qi is nevertheless considered one of the top Chinese painters ever, a consummate painter who so clearly connects humanity to the prolific beauty of nature in small, everyday ways— a trait that won him the nickname of “The Master of the Ordinary.” Qi was content to paint his surroundings and the little details that brought him joy on his daily travels: fish, insects, plants, flowers, and figures, rather than imagined or contrived visual stories. And that’s what is so fascinating about the story of Qi Baishi— his commonplace subject matter that became the most expensive art ever sold at auction by someone from his home continent.
Qi’s humble background also stands in great contrast to the heights that his art would achieve in 2017. Born in Xiangtan, Hunan Province in 1864, he came into his own in an inter-generational family, where Qi and his eight brothers and sisters were raised by both his parents and grandparents. After attending school for only one year, he was then tasked with assisting his family as a cowherd, before being apprenticed to a local carpenter at the age of fourteen. He stayed on, working as a carpenter for a few years, which was great, because it helped him get established from a financial standpoint, something that became especially important after he got married at age nineteen and began a family of his own. But after a couple more years, he came to the conclusion that, while it was nice to be financially stable, his job didn’t bring him much joy or satisfaction. So he decided to make a change in his twenties, when he taught himself to paint via referencing a guide to Chinese painting from the Qin dynasty period, China’s first imperial dynasty, way back around 220 years BCE— a guide called The Mustard Seed Garden Manual. Think briefly about the radicality of all of this, if you can. This isn’t now that we’re talking about, this is a guy in the mid-19th century China deciding to shrug off his dissatisfying job and deciding instead to teach himself how to paint. The stakes were high—and the rate of failure certainly was, too. But we already know that Qi didn’t fail. Instead, he worked tirelessly to learn every aspect of his new trade. When he couldn’t afford to hire models to learn how to paint the human figure, he instead drew pictures based off of local opera performers. By 1888, his self-education was complete, but even though his foundations were strong, he still needed more. He needed a mentor, someone clearly trained in all the traditions of Chinese painting. In 1888, he developed a relationship with Xiao Xianghai, the finest portrait painter in the area, who trained Qi alongside two others—Chen Shaofan, who taught Qi the finer points of poetry and calligraphy, and Tu Pan, who schooled him on landscapes. By the 1890s, he had felt comfortable enough in his abilities, and his potential for making a living via painting, that he quit his carpenter job altogether. And the timing could not have been better, because only a couple years later, Qi’s life took a massively positive turn.
In 1894, Qi’s life had a major upswing when he was introduced to a wealthy patron of the arts, a man by the name of Hu Qinyuan. Hu Qingyuan liked Qi’s style, and so he sponsored his ongoing studies in both classical poetry and painting--particularly painting in what was known as the “Gongbi” mode of painting. With roots that reach all the way back to the Han Dynasty, approximately 2000 years ago, “Gongbi” is one of the oldest Chinese painting styles. Its distinctive look comes together via the use of very fine brushstrokes to delineate a subject in high detail, with thin washes of color for its backdrop. It’s a highly refined technique, and one that values close observation and attention to realism over anything super individualistic or expressive. Even now, it’s still a popular and important style of painting in China, and in Qi’s time it was even more so, and his patron’s financial support allowed Qi to spend several years traveling across his vast country to study the landscape, flora, and fauna, as well as the art inspired by such landscapes, flora, and fauna.
Like many who step out of the comfort zone to travel, Qi Baishi’s voyages changed him-- or, at the very least, they changed his art. On one of his trips, he visited a private art collection in Guangxi, now an autonomous region but then a Chinese province. In this collection, Qi discovered paintings by two artists: Xu Wei and Zhu Da, painters who worked in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively, whose art was created in the so-called Xieyi mode-- and apologies for my lack of proper Chinese pronunciation, everyone. Xieyi roughly translates to “thought sketches,” which lends us a pretty clear sensation, right off the bat, of the appearance of such works: swift, expressive, showcasing ideas that flit across the mind like a butterfly, not the pained and detailed observations of a scholar or scientist. This freehand brushwork was typically created on a special kind of super-absorbent rice paper called xuan, and though it might sound simple, it was actually fairly rigorous in its own right: Xieyi artists tasked themselves with detailing the spiritual and ephemeral qualities of nature and the human condition. You know, no big deal, just trying to quickly capture the essence of life in some gorgeous brushstrokes here, la di da. This idea shook Qi Baishi. He had spent so long studying and acting in the Gongbi style, which was about as strict as Xieyi was loose, and this new concept was freeing, a sensation, and he opted to follow in the footsteps of these earlier masters, working in the Xieyi style when it was no longer so popular.
Naturally such individuality ruffled some feathers along the way, and Qi Baishi’s contemporaries would sometimes complain about his rebellious nature, grumbling at his lack of respect for the ancient traditions and rules of landscape painting. And Qi grumbled right back, writing, quote, “I am accused of unorthodoxy. But I pity this generation’s stupidity, for they do not seem to realize that ...we all may have our unique qualities...I suppose future generations will admire our present artists just as much as we admire the men of old.” Unquote. In describing his preferred working style, he described his mission succinctly, stating, quote, “I don’t imitate nature, I work like her.”
Coming up: Qi Baishi makes a move and moves on up in the artistic stratosphere. Stay with us.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
The dawn of the 20th century found Qi Baishi in mid-life and looking for a change of pace, particularly as he was determined to continue to up his game and become even more successful as a professional painter. In 1911, he met his lifetime artistic patron and friend Chen Shizeng, a painter and academic scholar residing in Beijing. Chen and Qi were like-minded in their artistic pursuits, so Qi opted, around 1917, to move permanently to Beijing, where Chen Shizeng was also based. And it was Chen and another friend, Hu Peiheng, who worked tirelessly to support their pal’s art career, especially in Beijing, whose clientele Qi Baishi found much too conservative, once declaring, quote, “People in Beijing did not like me; there simply was not a single person who would have understood my paintings.” But Chen and Hu knew--and they understood, so much so that, according to a Christie’s catalogue entry in 2015, Chen viewed an album of landscapes that Qi completed, titled Jieshan Tu (or Paintings of Borrowed Mountains). He was so dazzled by Qi’s works that he proclaimed to Hu, quote, “Jieshan Tu is so innovative that no average painter could have created it. It is a pity that the ordinary people don't understand. We should help this old peasant by raising awareness of his paintings." Unquote. And help they did. For Hu’s part, he wrote a text that translates to An Appreciation of Qi Baishi's Painting-- a work so important for understanding not only Baishi’s painting techniques and iconography, but also gives the rough outlines of the artist’s life, too, and is thus still the primary document we have to study the artist’s works today.
And Chen helped Qi Baishi’s career even more. First, Chen introduced him to the Shanghai School of painting, which once again changed Qi’s works for the better. Shanghai, at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th, was a truly international city, a hub between West and East in a way that Beijing most definitely was not. Under British influence after their victory in the first Opium War of the YEARS, it became extraordinarily wealthy, and many Chinese elite relocated to the glittering city to enjoy its many riches. And just like now, the elite wanted the most cutting-edge artworks they could find to decorate their new homes and estates in Shanghai. And this is where the Shanghai School of painting came into being, a smart reaction to a changing market that sought to redefine the concept of “cool” in art. For both the artists and patrons of the Shanghai School, it was a lot like what Qi Baishi was already gravitating toward— fewer narrative scenes, no symbolic content. Super-expressive brushstrokes, less adherence to the traditional ways of painting. And most of all— brighter palettes of sparkling colors. So Qi diversified his palette even further, abstracted his designs a bit more, and with that, his work, in the second half of his life, became far more coveted.
By the 1920s, Qi Baishi had become a truly prolific painter receiving both national and international attention. In 1922, his good friend Chen acted Qi’s art dealer, bringing Qi’s works to an art exhibition in Tokyo, where they made a truly remarkable splash. Every single one of his paintings were sold—entering both public and private collections, with two of his works even reaching Paris, where all things East Asian had been in vogue for the last half-century. For many, the primary enticement of Qi’s works was the poetic way he approached his subjects— hinting at the subject matter more than blatantly revealing it. He depicted flowers, birds, insects, frogs, shrimp, fish, and plants in an appealing, abstract fashion. About his approach, Qi noted, quote, “The excellence of a painting lies in its being alike, yet unlike. Too much likeness flatters the vulgar taste; too much unlikeness deceives the world.” After years of self-educating, of striving to find patrons and mentors, Qi had finally made it, and his gentle, spirited everyday scenes became the talk of the town.
What’s awesome about Qi Baishi’s career is that not only did he make it big towards the end of his lifetime, but the greatest accolade ever bestowed upon him, some may say, didn’t arrive until more than fifty years after his death at the age of 93 in 1957. In December 2017, a set of landscape screens, titled...wait for it… Twelve Landscape Screens— hit the auction block in Beijing. Twelve Landscape Screens, created in 1925, is one of the largest painting sets that the artist ever produced at the peak of his career. Each of the screens measures 71 inches by 18 ½ inches—pretty large for sure— and highlights the astounding beauty of the varied landscapes Qi experienced during his extensive travels throughout China at mid-life. In nearly every landscape, Qi created a perfect union between the natural world and human presence by marrying majestic skies, mountains, rivers, and trees to houses, bridges, and boats— a gorgeous balance of land and people. His expressive brushstrokes and dynamic colors are accompanied by calligraphic self-composed poetic inscriptions. Truly, it’s a stunning collection of objects, and one of the only twelve-panel, large-scale sets produced by Qi Baishi— the only other one in existence was produced in 1932 for Sichuan military commander Wang Zuanxu and is currently located at the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, China. For something similar to come available on the art market was a revelation. And it showed. Because Qi Baishi’s Twelve Landscape Screens sold at auction house Poly Beijing for a record price of $140.8 million. This unprecedented price surpassed other members of the so-called $100 million club, the select group of artists whose works have sold, at auction or elsewhere, for the fabled nine-figure sum, or more. Big names--and mostly white, male, and thus Western, artists, like Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. The purchase price for Twelve Landscape Screens surpassed the previous auction record for Qi’s own works, too-- which were nothing to laugh at, either. Just the year prior, in December 2016, Qi’s works had garnered a sum of $28 million, and now, he was among the extraordinary elite for whom the art world clamored.
It surely would have amused Qi Baishi--perhaps even bringing him a kind of gratification--to know how his artwork, little understood or admired during most of his lifetime, would become so cherished, especially in his own country. Though the purchaser of Twelve Landscape Screens wasn’t made public knowledge, the helmsman of the sale at Poly Beijing did confirm that the majority of the bidders were located in mainland China. His home, it seems, now treasured him as much as we, in the U.S., might treasure our own American greats, like Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and others. In fact, while most of us might not know his name or be familiar with his works, in China, he’s referred to, quite lovingly, as “The Picasso of China.”
One final lovely note is that Qi Baishi didn’t die a total unknown, or a fully unappreciated genius. In the final years of his life, Qi was honored by the Chinese Ministry of Culture as one of the outstanding artists of his time, as well as an incredible humanitarian who worked tirelessly for peace. In 1954, he was selected as a delegate to attend the first National Peace Congress, and then, at the age of 90, Qi Baishi was honored with the title of “The People’s Artist” in China. But the greatest achievement he received--not including the inclusion in the $100 million club-- is that he was awarded the World Peace Council’s International Peace Award. Think of it as similar to the Nobel Peace Prize. Nothing to sneer at, right, especially for an artist.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with additional writing and research help by Arina Novak. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Audio production services are provided by Kaboonki, the silliest name in superb podcasts and video. Let them help you too at kaboonki.com. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator. We’re a fully independent podcast, and we rely on sponsors and donations to keep us going, so if you enjoy this show and have the means, please consider giving $10 to help this show, and thank you for your kindness. And if you don’t have money to give, that’s okay! You can help our show as well by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen-- believe me, it makes a huge difference and helps new listeners tune in. For more details about our show, including the image mentioned in this episode today, please visit our website: artcuriouspodcast.com. We’re also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at artcuriouspod.
Check back with us in two weeks when we premiere the season finale of the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in the most expensive works ever sold in art history.
