welcome to the bada shanren homepage!!!

☆ a shrine to a painter dead 300 years who still looks unimpressed ☆

This page is dedicated to Bada Shanren (八大山人), born Zhu Da in 1626 — a Ming prince who outlived his own dynasty, became a monk to survive the one that replaced it, and spent his last decades painting fish and birds that stare out of the paper with one contemptuous eye. He signed his late work so the two characters could be read as either crying or laughing. Nobody has settled which he meant, and that is more or less the whole site.

“哭之笑之” — cry for it, or laugh at it. He never said which.

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