Bada Shanren, the Ming Prince Turned Painter Whose Fish Still Glare Back

Bada Shanren

Born	1626 Xinjian District
Died	1705
Occupation	Painter

Look closely at a fish painted by Bada Shanren and it looks back. The eye is a ring with the pupil shoved against its rim, rolled upward or sideways, the expression somewhere between contempt and boredom. In China these creatures now circulate as memes for office fatigue, and plush versions sell out in museum shops. The man who drew them was a prince of a dynasty that no longer existed, and he spent half his life making sure nobody could pin him down.

Even his name resists. The family genealogy recorded him as Zhu Tongquan; Zhu Da, the name under which much of the world still files him, never appears among his own signatures or seals. He went through dozens of names, some of them jokes on the word for donkey, before settling on Bada Shanren. The name is translated as “mountain man of the eight greats” or “eight eminent mountain men”, and he never explained it in a way anyone has agreed on.

He was born in Nanchang, in Jiangxi province, in 1626, into the Yiyang branch of the Ming imperial house. The family was cultured rather than rich. His grandfather wrote poetry, painted and carved seals; his father, also a painter, had a speech impediment, a detail that would echo later. The boy wrote verse as a child and was being prepared for the civil service examinations when, in 1644, the Ming collapsed and the Manchu Qing took Beijing. He was eighteen.

Members of the imperial clan had every reason to disappear. After Qing troops reached Nanchang he went into hiding, and in 1648 he shaved his head and entered a Chan Buddhist temple in Fengxin county, west of the city, under the name Chuanqi. He stayed in the order for some three decades and, by one account, led nearly a hundred disciples. The few album leaves that survive from those years, lotus stalks slicing across empty paper and flowers pushed into the corners, already leave the centre of the sheet bare.

The only likeness of him that scholars accept dates from that period. In 1674 his friend Huang Anping painted him standing in a wide straw hat and a loose robe, more scholar than monk; around the figure the sitter added six inscriptions of his own, one recording that he was forty-nine. The Portrait of Geshan, named after one of his monastic sobriquets, belongs to the Bada Shanren Memorial Hall in Nanchang.

The break came at the end of that decade. Invited to stay with Hu Yitang, the magistrate of Linchuan, he broke down. According to Shao Changheng, a contemporary who wrote an account of his life, he laughed and wept by turns, tore up and burned his monk’s robe one evening and ran back to Nanchang, where he capered through the market until a nephew recognised him and took him home. Later he wrote the character for “mute” in large script and fixed it to his door, and from then on, Shao wrote, he spoke to no one. Another writer of the time, Zhang Chao, heard that when military men held him for days to paint for them, he defecated in their reception hall until they let him go.

By about 1680 he had left monastic life for good, married again briefly and begun to live from his brush in Nanchang. He first signed as Bada Shanren in 1684, on an album copying a Daoist scripture, and kept the name until he died. Written in cursive, the four characters were often run together so that the first pair resembles the character for crying or for laughing and the second pair a grammatical particle, and generations of viewers have read the signature as “crying at it, laughing at it”. By one count, 167 of his 179 dated works come from 1684 onward.

The late painting is ink on paper, with almost no colour. Myna birds, lotuses and rocks dominate the 1680s; in the early 1690s he turned to fish, often a single one in an empty field; then came landscapes and tall hanging scrolls. His brushwork tracks his calligraphy, which moved from Tang models toward the manner of Wang Xizhi. Scale goes deliberately askew: a bird dwarfs the boulder under it, a fish hangs in nothing at all. The long handscroll Flowers on the River, painted in 1697 and now in the Tianjin Museum, follows lotus plants from bud to full bloom and on into landscape.

The trouble is how much of the Bada Shanren story rests on hearsay. The madness comes from a few contemporary anecdotes, and nobody can say whether it was illness, grief, theatre or simply the safest course for a Ming prince under Qing rule; one theory holds that he was effectively detained at Linchuan. The white eyes are routinely read as loyalist defiance, an echo of the ancient poet Ruan Ji, who showed the whites of his eyes to people he despised, yet Bada left no statement of intent, and his poems hide behind allusions only a reader with his training could follow. Stephen Allee, a curator of Chinese painting at the Freer Gallery, has admitted that with Bada “one never really finds the answer”. The catalogue is unsteady too: Zhang Daqian’s twentieth-century copies after him are good enough that specialists still sort them by the shape of the brushstroke.

He died in Nanchang in 1705, at about seventy-nine, still living on slim earnings. Wu Changshuo inscribed a poem on one of his scrolls, and Qi Baishi declared that he would gladly be reborn as a dog at the gates of Xu Wei, of Bada and of Wu Changshuo. The Freer Gallery in Washington holds seventy-two of his works, the largest group outside China, most of them given in 1998 by the estate of the scholar Wang Fangyu. A crater on Mercury has carried his name, as Chu Ta, since 1976.

The four hundredth anniversary of his birth has made 2026 his year. In Nanchang, the Jiangxi Provincial Museum and the Bada Shanren Memorial Hall jointly showed 129 paintings and calligraphies from 22 institutions until 10 October, the largest gathering of his work up to then. By mid-September it had drawn about 400,000 visitors, and plush toys of his birds had earned around 400,000 yuan in its first twenty days. Until mid-August the National Art Museum of China in Beijing traced his influence on later ink painters, and two Tokyo museums marked the anniversary in the winter.

The next stop is bigger still. In December the Shanghai Museum opens at its eastern branch what it calls the largest Bada Shanren exhibition ever held, about 180 works and sets from more than twenty collections, among them the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tokyo National Museum, on view until March 2027. It will put his fish before crowds who already know their stare from their phones, and leave open the question he spent a lifetime declining to answer.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Bada Shanren, Qi Baishi, Chinese ink painting