Li Keran, the ink painter condemned for black mountains and priced for red ones

Li Keran

Born	March 26, 1907 Tongshan District
Died	December 5, 1989 (82)
Occupation	Painter

Two seals went with Li Keran when he left Beijing to paint outdoors. One read “what is precious is courage”, the other “what is needed is soul”, and he pressed them onto landscapes that broke an old habit of Chinese ink painting, in which artists copied the mountains of earlier masters instead of looking at real ones. He spent the rest of his working life teaching ink, the blackest material a painter owns, to carry light. Then the official press called the result darkness.

That reversal sits at the centre of his career and never quite resolved. The same brush made the landscapes a Shanghai newspaper denounced as black mountains and evil water, and the red hills after a poem by Mao Zedong that collectors would later pay record sums for. He was trained in oil painting and became one of the most influential teachers of Chinese ink of his generation.

He was born Li Yongshun on 26 March 1907 in Xuzhou, in Jiangsu province, to peasants who could not read. At thirteen he was studying with a local painter, Qian Shizhi. After the Shanghai Art Academy he won a place in 1929 at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he studied oil painting with its president, Lin Fengmian, and the French professor André Claudot. In 1931 he joined the Eighteen Art Society, a leftist group the Nationalist government closed down, and left Hangzhou to teach in Xuzhou. His figure painting Zhong Kui was selected for the national exhibition in Nanjing in 1937.

The war with Japan made him a propagandist. In 1938 he joined the propaganda office in Wuhan led by the writer Guo Moruo and painted posters and murals against the invasion. In Chongqing, where he followed the government’s retreat, his lodgings stood next to a cowshed, and the water buffalo became a lifelong subject; he later named his studio the Hall of the Teacher Ox. Xu Beihong ordered one of the Chongqing pictures, Mutong yao zhi Xinghuacun, a herd boy pointing towards a village of apricot blossom.

Xu brought him north in 1946 to teach at the National Beiping Art School, later the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where Li trained a generation of painters. In the spring of 1947, at forty, he became a pupil of Qi Baishi and stayed at his side for ten years, while also learning from Huang Binhong, the landscape painter of dense, layered ink. The apprenticeship was a method: he told his students to enter the tradition with the greatest effort in order to come out of it with the greatest courage.

The way out was painting from life. In 1954 he set off with Zhang Ding and Luo Ming on a three-month tour of the lower Yangtze, painting on site, and before leaving he had the seal carver Deng Sanmu cut the two seals about courage and soul. Ink painting was then under pressure to show socialist life and prove it was no relic. In 1957 he travelled to East Germany with the painter Guan Liang and exhibited in Berlin.

What he took from his oil training was light. Li admired Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro and built a landscape lit from behind the mountain, so the forms stand dark against a bright edge, the backlit landscape that became his signature. He layered ink until a slope turned almost black, leaving a strip of bare paper to shine through. Christie’s has described his central achievement as setting the darkest ink against the brightest light.

The new state’s commissions pulled the same technique towards red. Li’s best-known work, Wan Shan Hong Bian, known in English as Thousands of Hills in a Crimsoned View, takes its title from Mao’s poem “Changsha” and its image of mountains turned red. He painted seven versions in the early 1960s, completing the cycle in 1964, and added an accumulated-colour technique of his own to the old accumulated-ink method, so that vermilion builds up like ink.

The Cultural Revolution stopped him painting for about six years. In the early 1970s Premier Zhou Enlai had him called back to Beijing from a May Seventh Cadre School to paint for hotels that received foreign guests. Those pictures became evidence. In 1974, in the campaign against so-called black paintings led by Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan, Beijing Daily attacked the hotel paintings, Li’s among them, and on 31 May the Shanghai paper Wenhui Bao ran an article titled “Black Mountains and Evil Waters Harboring Malicious Intent” aimed at his work. It called the landscape on the cover of an export catalogue “a puddle of ink” and a 1963 view of Mount Huangshan “a black mess”. The critic was describing, with hostility, exactly what Li had spent twenty years trying to achieve. The later market has its own distortion: its top prices have gone to the red, politically titled paintings, so the Li Keran that circulates at auction is the one closest to the official taste of its day.

He was elected vice-chairman of the China Artists Association in 1979, and in 1981 became the first president of the Chinese Painting Research Institute, the forerunner of today’s China National Academy of Painting. His followers in the 1980s were called the Li School. He was also a calligrapher and a huqin player. He died of a heart attack in Beijing on 5 December 1989. He had married Su E in 1931, and they had four children before her death in 1938; in 1944 he married the sculptor Zou Peizhu, with whom he had three more. Their son Li Xiaoke became a painter and photographer.

The prices climbed after his death. The largest version of Wan Shan Hong Bian sold at Poly Auction in Beijing in June 2012 for 293.25 million yuan, about 46 million dollars, his auction record. The smallest, which the Beijing dealer Rong Bao Zhai had bought for 80 yuan four decades earlier, made 184 million yuan at China Guardian in 2015, and Shaoshan, a view of Mao’s birthplace, fetched 124 million yuan there in 2012. The demand has not faded: at Christie’s autumn sales in Hong Kong at the end of October 2026, his Sailing in River Li, painted in 1972, sold for 12.8 million Hong Kong dollars.

In 2017 the National Museum of China showed 162 paintings and calligraphies from his last decade, under the name of his final studio, Mo Tian Ge. The landscapes in it are still built from layer upon layer of ink, with the light held back to a thin bright edge: the picture the critics of 1974 called a black mess, and the one his students learned to paint.

Tags: art, artists, Li Keran, Qi Baishi, Chinese art, Huang Binhong