INVALUABLE ART

Qi Baishi's landscape paintings are ruling the exhibition circuit in China decades after being criticized for not following convention, Lin Qi reports.

Qi Baishi, the late ink artist, won the hearts of generations of Chinese with his paintings in two main styles - gongbi, where details of the subject are captured by brush strokes, and xieyi, a more sketch-like approach. His works depict butterflies, bees, dragonflies and birds in the gongbi style, amid flowers, fruits and vegetables in the xieyi style.

Yet Qi (1864-1957), who had a successful career in the flower-and-bird genre, was criticized for his landscape pieces for not conforming to the conventional style that Chinese painters before him followed with their mountain-and-water paintings. Qi once said that he faced "strong disapproval from mainstream artists, which nearly made me quit".