FQM is pleased to present A Well of Rouge, a Flower of Fortune: Teaching and Learning in Chinese Flower Painting during Asia Week New York this fall. At its center are Li Fenggong’s flower-painting lessons: baimiao, or “outline drawing,” demonstrations with written instructions, together with student studies bearing his vermilion annotations, shown alongside over ten flower paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties through the modern period. Following two interwoven threads—the ke (lesson), encompassing demonstration and correction, and the pu (lineage), tracing transmission and schools—the exhibition traces how Chinese bird-and-flower painting was passed from teacher to student across centuries, generation after generation, before eventually crossing the sea and taking root in New York. The exhibition will be on view at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art from September 12 through October 31, 2026.
Li Fenggong 李鳳公 1884-1967
Flower-Painting Lessons: Baimiao Demonstrations with Instructions; Student Studies with Vermilion Annotations 花卉白描課徒稿
Ink and color on paper, two sets of albums
Each leaf 9 3/4 x 12 3/4 in.
Each leaf 24.6 x 32.3 cm.
In the transmission of traditional Chinese painting, a teacher’s demonstration drafts were often discarded once they had served their purpose, while students’ exercises were scattered and lost. The appearance of a real classroom can therefore usually be reconstructed only indirectly, through finished manuals such as the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. The exhibition’s central works—Li Fenggong’s flower-painting lessons—are consequently exceptionally rare. Together, they preserve the full teaching sequence: Li Fenggong’s baimiao demonstrations and written instructions, Guo Tianyou’s color studies, and Li Fenggong’s vermilion annotations on those studies. More than one hundred sheets allow a traditional Chinese painting class from the middle of the twentieth century to be reconstructed from surviving material evidence. The manuscripts are undated; the sole clue for establishing their date is Guo Tianyou’s 1984 inscription: “Works of flower painting studied fifty years ago under the late teacher Li Fenggong.” Here, “fifty years” is approximate, suggesting that the lessons took place broadly in the later 1930s or early 1940s.
Li Fenggong, whose given name was Fengting and whose courtesy name was Fenggong, was a native of Dongguan, Guangdong. In his early years, he founded a watercolor correspondence school and a sculpture-casting company in Guangzhou. He later taught in the Chinese Painting Department of the Guangzhou Municipal Art School and was one of the principal initiators of the Guangdong Chinese Painting Research Association. In 1938, he took refuge in Hong Kong; after the war, he established the Fenggong Chinese Painting Academy, where he taught paintings. These lessons employ a method of “step-by-step demonstration”: flowers are arranged from simple to complex according to the number of petals, from four-petaled begonias to peonies with multiple layers of petals. Each flower is marked with the order of brushstrokes and shown in a range of forms—“bud, about to open, half-open, fully open, side-facing, and viewed from the back.” Dashed lines indicate the unfolded form of a folded leaf, while fractions explain the reduction required by pictorial perspective: a leaf that measures five parts when unfolded may register only one part or half a part once folded into the painting. Dozens of vermilion notes survive, variously offering affirmation (“The rest is excellent”), correction (“Thin the color at the base of the petals slightly”), or instruction (“For yellow, use the powder-wash method; for white, the accumulated-powder method”). Diagnosis and prescription appear together, making these manuscripts a rare surviving material record of traditional Chinese painting instruction.
Organized around these flower-painting lessons, the exhibition brings together flower paintings spanning several centuries. The baimiao lineage reaches back to the Northern Song tradition of Li Gonglin (1049-1106), who “established form through line.” Li Fenggong’s self-carved seal, reading “Longmian Family Method” (with 瞑 used for 眠, referring to Li Gonglin’s sobriquet Longmian Jushi), makes this lineage explicit. The seal appears on a peony fan presented to Liang Jinyu (1911-2003) in 1961. The mogu, or boneless, lineage begins with Yun Shouping (1633-1690) and the Changzhou School. The exhibition places two of his fan paintings side by side: Three Roses and a Bee, whose inscription cites the “coloring method of the Xu family” and openly acknowledges its artistic lineage, and Peach Blossom Fan, whose poem draws on the legend of the Peach Blossom Spring at Wuling, conveying a personal sentiment beyond the act of painting from life. This tradition continued through Yun’s student Ma Yuanyu (1669-1722) and was passed on to Ma Quan. Outside this genealogy, the mid-Qing woman painter Wang Luqing established her own distinctive manner in gongbi flowers and butterflies “in imitation of the brushwork of the Song.” These works also remind us how long women painters were underestimated in the orthodox narrative of Chinese painting history. In the transmission of painting—especially flower painting—they were never absent, but rather carriers of the tradition: from Ma Quan and Wang Luqing to Guo Tianyou, who preserved her teacher’s lessons, this line sustained by women is one of the most moving strands beyond that established narrative.
Ma Quan 馬荃
Flowers and Insects 草蟲花卉, 1706
signed Jiangxiang nvshi Ma Quan, dated bingxu (1706), spring
ink and color on paper, album of twelve leaves
Each leaf 9 1/4 x 7 1/2 in. (12)
Each leaf 23.5 x 19 cm. (12)
Another line of literati sketching runs from Zhou Zhimian’s “outlined flowers and dotted leaves,” through Yang Jin’s studies after Shen Zhou, to works of Zheng Xie (1693-1765) and Li Shan (1686-1756), two of the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou.” Hundred Flowers as Offerings, a 1923 collaboration by fourteen artists including Gao Jianfu (1879-1951), Gao Qifeng (1889-1933), and Li Fenggong, who painted the daylily, together with Zhang Daqian’s (1899-1983) Mountain Kitchen Offerings (1941), brings this lineage into the modern period. The daylily Li Fenggong taught in these lessons was a flower he had himself painted—in the collaborative work, under his given name, Fengting.
The exhibition also tells another story of artistic transmission: what was passed on was not a painting method, but an eye for paintings. Wu Hufan (1894-1968) and his Meiying Studio, represented here by Ink Plum, an Ice Heart, transmitted more than painting alone; they cultivated and passed on an eye. Those close to him, including Guo Chunpu (1938-2022) and Wang Jiqian (C. C. Wang, 1907-2003), inherited precisely this way of seeing. Wang Jiqian settled in New York in 1949. In 1973, under the direction of Wen Fong, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired from him, en bloc, twenty-five Song and Yuan paintings, establishing the framework of its collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Here, artistic lineage is transmitted not only through the brush, but also through the act of looking at works: the Yun Shouping fans once held in Guo Chunpu’s Qinyanzhai collection and the old masterworks seen by Wang Jiqian bear such marks as “Treasured by Chunpu,” “Qinyanzhai,” and “Masterworks Seen Overseas by Wang Jiqian.” Together, these seals are material evidence of a teacher-student lineage transmitted from eye to eye.
Yun Shouping 惲壽平 1633-1690
Three Roses and A Bee
signed Yun Shouping, inscribed with a poem, with a dedication, and three seals of the artist: shou ping zhi yin, yuan ke, nan tian xiao ying
ink and color on paper, fan leaf
6 3/4 x 20 3/4 in.
17.1 x 52.7 cm.
We warmly invite you to visit FQM, between the line of baimiao and the color of mogu, revisit this mid-twentieth-century lesson in flower painting, and witness firsthand how a lineage passed from teacher to student has endured on paper and been reborn across the sea.
