A Well of Rouge, a Flower of Fortune: Teaching and Learning in Chinese Flower Painting

Research on traditional Chinese painting has relied primarily on two kinds of material: works of art and written sources. Works provide objects for visual analysis, including their forms, brushwork, and inscriptions; painting histories, treatises, and related texts offer information about artists, stylistic lineages, and systems of connoisseurship. The two are read against one another and together form the basic method of painting history. Yet between works and texts lies another important subject: the ways in which painting was transmitted, practised, and corrected through teaching.

How did a teacher demonstrate? How did a student practise? How were exercises corrected, and how were abstract principles of painting converted into procedures that could be carried out with brush and colour? Finished works and historical records rarely answer these questions directly. Teaching materials were inherently ephemeral: demonstration sheets could be discarded once they had served their purpose, students’ exercises were easily scattered, and correction usually took place within the studio rather than entering systems of collecting and publication. Knowledge of traditional painting education today is therefore often inferred from completed manuals such as the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting; the material form and practical operation of an actual classroom have rarely survived intact.

This exhibition centres on Li Fenggong’s (1884–1967) baimiao flower-painting teaching drafts. The materials preserve, in one body of evidence, fine-line demonstrations, written instructions, student exercises, and annotations in red ink, making it possible to identify the successive stages of teaching, learning, and assessment on paper. Shown alongside flower paintings from the Ming and Qing periods through the modern era, they allow the exhibition to examine how knowledge of flower painting was transmitted, transformed, and preserved through methods of representation, lineages of instruction, women’s participation, and the circulation of works through modern collecting.

The red-ink annotations provide another layer of evidence. The surviving notes can be broadly divided into affirmation, correction, and technical instruction. “The rest is excellent” and “The colour and powder are well applied” affirm the exercise as a whole or in part; “Thin the colour at the base of the petals slightly” corrects the density of the colour; and “For yellow, use the powder-wash method; for white, the accumulated-powder method” gives a specific technical direction. One note on a begonia exercise reads: “The veins are too dense near the tip; use more water when painting the branch.” The first clause identifies the problem; the second proposes a procedure for correcting it. The note therefore moves from diagnosis to prescription, showing that instruction involved not only a judgment of success or failure but also an analysis of particular problems in brushwork.

The drafts bear no explicit date. The principal basis for dating them is Guo Tianyou’s 1984 inscription: “Works of flower painting studied fifty years ago under the late teacher Li Fenggong.” “Fifty years ago” should be understood as approximate, placing this group of teaching drafts broadly in the late 1930s or early 1940s, during Li Fenggong’s teaching activities in Hong Kong.

The peony fan of 1961 was painted late in Li Fenggong’s life and dedicated to “Jingyu,” Liang Jingyu (1911–2003). Its seal, “Longmian Family Method,” connects the late work with the baimiao tradition of Li Gonglin. Peony belongs to the more complex category of multi-petalled flowers in the teaching drafts and requires the combined use of powder-wash, accumulated-powder, and powder-collision methods. Read alongside the demonstrations in the teaching drafts, the fan reveals a continuity between instructional procedures and artistic practice: the drafts were not abstract manuals detached from painting, but were grounded in the painter’s own experience of observation, brushwork, and colour.

Taken together, the teaching drafts, the daylily, and the peony fan present Li Fenggong’s dual identity. Through decades of teaching, he established a mechanism for transmitting knowledge of painting; in his own works, he also practised and preserved that method. The relationship between what he taught and what he painted is a central line through which the exhibition approaches his artistic activity.

Ma Yuanyu continued Yun Shouping’s flower-painting tradition. His twelve-leaf album includes willows, peach blossom, pomegranate, calamus, fish, and peony, and bears a 1719 colophon by Yang Jin, who wrote that “Qixiazi and I have been friends since childhood.” Yang Jin was a pupil of Wang Hui. The colophon therefore provides more than an assessment of Ma Yuanyu’s painting: it also indicates an interaction between the Yun school and the Yushan school in the practice of painting from life and in the networks of literati exchange. The album combines observation of nature with the study of ancient models, demonstrating that early Qing flower painting did not develop within strictly separate school boundaries.

Wang Luqing, whose dates are unknown, offers a case distinct from the main Yun-school line. Her Butterflies and Saxifrage is inscribed “in imitation of Song brushwork” and depicts flowers and butterflies through meticulous outlines, identifying the Song academic tradition as its model. Existing histories record very little about her life, and the surviving catalogue record and related research remain limited. The more cautious position is therefore to treat her as an early Qing woman painter whose work can be examined through the object itself, without making claims about her life or lineage that exceed the evidence.

These works indicate that the transmission of flower painting cannot be explained solely through genealogies of male painters. Ma Quan transformed a family tradition through outline-and-wash; Wang Luqing entered the academic tradition through “imitation of the Song”; and Guo Tianyou preserved Li Fenggong’s teaching drafts. Their periods, identities, and modes of transmission differ, but all demonstrate that women were not only creators of flower painting but also important participants in the preservation of painting knowledge.

Transmission in painting takes place not only through the teaching of methods, but also through practices of looking, authentication, and collecting. For this exhibition, the relationship between Wu Hufan and Wang Jiqian offers an entry point into the transmission of a connoisseurial eye.

Wu Hufan (1894–1968) was the adopted grandson of Wu Dacheng and the master of the Meiying Studio. The exhibition includes Ink Plum, Ice Heart, painted in 1945 and re-inscribed in 1953. Its inscription states that the poem follows the rhyme of “Liu Shao Qing” by the Southern Song ink-plum painter Yang Wujiu (1097–1169), placing Wu Hufan’s painting and inscription in relation to an earlier tradition. The work is therefore an example of modern ink-plum painting and of the way Wu Hufan positioned himself within the continuity of ancient painting through inscription and calligraphy.

Beyond the teaching drafts and the Yun Shouping line, the exhibition’s other works establish a historical context for flower painting.

Zheng Xie (1693–1765) painted Bamboo in Wind with the movement of running script. His inscription contrasts the mottled bamboo of Xiaoxiang with the bamboo groves of Weichuan and Qi. Bamboo here functions both as a botanical image and as a familiar emblem of integrity in literati painting. Its manner of representation may also be read alongside the instruction in the teaching drafts that bamboo leaves should be rendered in double outline, with five leaves as the standard. The comparison shows how one subject could assume different forms within a regulated teaching procedure and an individualised literati manner.

Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) painted Mountain Kitchen Offerings in 1941; its colophon by Xie Zhiliu (1910–1997) identifies Chen Chun, Xu Wei, Bada Shanren, and Shitao as sources for Zhang’s early work. These works use flowers, fruits, vegetables, and offerings as subjects, connecting traditional techniques of flower painting and literati themes with their transformation in the modern period.