Birds of Paradise 1940

Qi Baishi made this piece, Birds of Paradise, with ink and color on paper. It’s all about the dance between control and accident. Look at the strokes – they’re confident, but there’s a fluidity that suggests he's letting the ink do its thing. The red is so alive, right? Not just a flat color, but layered, with these subtle variations that give the birds real depth. And the black ink, those branches, they're so stark, almost graphic. It's like he's playing with positive and negative space, pushing and pulling our eye around the image. Check out the tails of the birds – how they loop and swirl, creating this sense of movement, like they could take off any second. It reminds me a bit of Franz Kline, in the way he uses bold strokes to create a dynamic composition. But while Kline is all about abstraction, Baishi grounds us in the natural world, reminding us of the beauty and fragility of life.