Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Dong Shouping was born in Hongdong, Shnxi Province. While completing his degree in economics in 1926 from Eastern University in Beijing, he took advantage of the newly opened National Palace Museum and began to study traditional Chinese painting. By the 1930s, he was considered an authority on Chinese painting and an accomplished painter of birds and flowers. He later took up landscape painting. In 1964 he was one of a select group of artists invited by the government to paint the landscape of the Long March in order to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples' Liberation Army.
Wet black ink painted over the paler ink strokes of the bamboo leaves and stems makes for a dynamic composition. Bamboo, an enduring subject of Asian painting, embodies the qualities of humility, fidelity, and integrity in its ability to bend rather than break.