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Japanese, 17th century, male.

Born 1644, in Iga; died 1694.

Painter, poet.

Basho is one of Japan’s most celebrated haiku poets. He also studied suiboku painting (ink painting) with Marikawa Kyoroku.

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Active in the second half of the 17th century.

Painter, poet.

Bo Erdu was a Manchu and a friend of the painter Shitao.

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Born 1601, in Haining (Zhejiang); died 1677.

Painter, historian.

Cha Jizuo was an historian who also painted landscapes in the style of Huang Gongwang.

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Activec.1620-1650.

Poet, calligrapher, painter. Flowers.

Chen Yuansu specialised in painting orchids.

Stockholm (Nationalmus.): Clump of Flowers growing on Plant (signed and dated 1630, on gold-flecked paper)

Chinese, 20th century, male.

Born 1903; died 1977.

Painter, calligrapher, writer, scholar.

Chiang Yee (Jiang Yi) moved to England in 1933, where he became something of a celebrity on account of his Silent Traveller books. These included The Silent Traveller in London, a travelogue of London in the 1930s, which includes examples of his sketches and calligraphy, and ...

Chinese, 12th century, male.

Painter, critic.

Song dynasty.

Deng Chun was a scholar-official who came to know painting at a very young age thanks to his family’s extensive art collection. He was the author of the most important history of art of the Southern Song dynasty, the ...

Japanese, 17th century, male.

Born 1579, in Koborimura (Omi); died 12 March 1647, in Fujimi, near Kyoto.

Painter, calligrapher, poet, architect. Landscapes.

Enju was a pupil of Taniju. He founded the Enju School, which was named after him.

Chinese, 20th century, male.

Born 1898, in Zongde (Zhejiang); died 1975.

Painter, cartoonist, essayist.

Feng Zikai studied with Li Shutong. In 1920, together with Liu Zhiping, he founded the Shanghai Private Arts University. In 1921 he went to Japan to study western art. He later taught at Zhejiang University and the National Art Academy, Chongqing. After the war he was director of the Chinese Artists Association....

Chinese, 20th century, male.

Active in France.

Born 4 January 1940, in Ganzhou (Jiangxi Province).

Painter, draughtsman, writer, illustrator. Stage sets.

The Nobel-prizewinning writer Gao Xingjian was a painter even before becoming a novelist, essayist, dramatist and director. He studied painting at Nanjing under the painter Yu Yungzhong. Then, in ...

Japanese, 14th – 15th century, male.

Born 1363 or 1370, probably in Yamashiro; died 23 June 1452, in Kyoto.

Monk-painter, poet.

Gukyoku Reisai was a Zen monk-painter who lived at the Kencho-ji in Kamakura and Nanzen-ji in Kyoto, and in later years headed the Tofuku-ji in Kyoto. He was a skilled calligrapher and painter of Buddhist subjects, being particularly interested in the figures of Tenjin and Monju, whom he painted in ink in rapid brushstrokes....

Chinese, 11th century, male.

Activec.1070-1080.

Art theorist.

Guo Ruoxu was the author of the most important work on the history of art of the Northern Song period, the Tu Hua Jian Wen zhi (1074), which saw itself as the continuation of the monumental treatise by Zhang Yanyuan, the ...

Chinese, 16th century, male.

Painter, poet.

An official, He Liangjun is the author of the Siyouzhai Hualun, a treatise on painting (c. 1530), an unoriginal collection of some 50 disjunctive texts, some taken from other authors, of merely documentary interest.

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1956, in Hong Kong.

Educator, curator, writer, sculptor, painter.

Ho received a B.F.A. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1983. After returning to Hong Kong, Ho was the exhibition director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre from 1998 to 2001. He also served as the founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, from 2004 to 2006. His curatorial projects include more than one hundred exhibitions, most notably the Asian section of the 96 Containers exhibition in Copenhagen in 1996; the second (1996) and third (1999) iterations of the Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia; and exhibitions at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, including Mobile Art Show (1988), Being Minorities: Contemporary Asian Art (1997), Museum 97: History, Community, Individual(1997), and ...

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Active during the second half of the 17th century.

Born in Xixian (Anhui).

Painter, writer. Landscapes.

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1934, in Mukden, Manchuria (now Shenyang, Liaoning), China; died 8 March 1997.

Engraver, writer.

Masuo Ikeda graduated with a diploma from the art school in Nagano in 1952, and then set up in Tokyo. He is a copper and wood engraver, as well as a silk-screen printer, and is considered one of the most brilliant 20th-century Japanese engravers. Having started in his youth as an oil painter in a style showing the influence of Matisse and Picasso, he then found engraving to be a more suitable medium. The technique of dry point in particular enables him to express his images and thoughts more directly, in a way that is more intimate and warm than with oils. Engraving has the further advantage of benefiting from wider exposure than a painting produced in a single copy. His figurative works are near to everyday life, out of which he produces a sort of poem in colour, drawing inspiration from both Western and Eastern traditions. There is often an underlying eroticism. He was also a writer, and his novel ...

Japanese, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1763; died 1827.

Painter, poet.

Issa lived in Shinona and Tokyo, and was a poet who wrote haikai ( haikai), Japanese poems of 17 syllables. He had a free and unconventional style, and left a large number of ...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Born 1895, in Kyushu; died 1933.

Painter, poet.

Koga Harue trained as a Buddhist monk, subsequently becoming a poet and then a painter. Influenced by Paul Klee and Giorgio de Chirico, he played an important role in the development of early 20th-century Japanese painting, introducing echoes of the modernist movements in Europe, such as cubism, futurism, constructivism and especially surrealism, which he can be said to represent. His pictures from the late 1920s are full of unusual and bizarre figuration. He exhibited regularly at the Nika (two disciplines - sculpture and painting) Salon and was selected for the 4th Nikakai Exhibition in ...

Japanese, 8th – 9th century, male.

Born 774, in Boyobugaura; died 22 April 835.

Painter, calligrapher, poet.

Kukai was a priest and founder of Shingon (‘true word’) esoteric Buddhism in Japan. He is best known as Kobo Daishi (‘propagator of the Dharma’), his posthumous name. He founded temples in Nara on Mount Koya and the Toji temple complex outside Kyoto. After a lengthy visit to China, Kukai brought back techniques that were to have an important influence on the birth of Japanese art....

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Activec.1657-1673.

Born 1612, in Wuling (now Changde), Hunan; died 1673.

Painter, calligrapher, poet. Landscapes.

With the collapse of the Ming dynasty, there emerged on the fringes of artistic orthodoxy an individualist trend whose most remarkable figures, at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, were Bada Shanren (...

Chinese-American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in the United States.

Born 1964, in Hong Kong.

Multimedia artist, curator, activist, writer.

Simon Leung immigrated to northern California from Hong Kong in 1974. He went on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1987 graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude. In 1988–1989, Leung participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Leung is a professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine. Leung’s work engages aesthetic form through socio-psychological and ethical practices, which mainly deal with issues of sexuality, border crossings, territories, and the ‘cosmopolitan nomad’; his long-term interest in displacement and desertion was expressed through filming the daily life of Warren Niesluchowski, a Polish immigrant to the United States. Since the early 1990s he has worked on a series of projects that consider the performative gesture of the squatting body, as a gesture of both occupation and resistance. Another topic that he has explored is the surfing communities in southern California and the lives of Vietnamese refugees who settled in the same area; this work formed part of a trilogy about the ‘residual space of the Vietnam War’. In ...