Eye-rolling birds pull 400,000 visitors to Bada Shanren anniversary show
A 17th-century painter of grumpy, side-eyeing birds is drawing some of the biggest young crowds in China this autumn.
The anniversary show for Bada Shanren, born Zhu Da in 1626, had pulled in around 400,000 visitors across its two venues in Nanchang by 15 September, according to a spokesperson for the Bada Shanren Memorial Hall in Nanchang The Art Newspaper. Many of them came for animals that look as if they are rolling their eyes at the viewer.
The show, titled So Lofty the Spirit, So Eternal the Ink, opened on 10 July and runs until 10 October. It is split between the Jiangxi Provincial Museum in Nanchang and the Bada Shanren Memorial Hall in Nanchang, and is described as the largest gathering of his work to date, with 129 paintings and pieces of calligraphy, the art of brush-written characters, lent by 22 museums and cultural bodies across China.
Zhu Da was born into the Ming imperial family. He was still a teenager when the Ming dynasty fell in 1644. He then spent decades as a Buddhist monk and only took the name Bada Shanren in his late 50s. He died in 1705.
His brushwork is spare and loose. Fish, birds and lotus flowers are caught in a few strokes of black ink, often with wide, staring or upturned eyes that now read as comic and fed-up.
Those looks have taken on a second life online. Cut-outs of his birds and fish have circulated in China as memes and phone emojis for eye-rolls and deadpan reactions. The Memorial Hall has leaned into that audience, and its posts about the exhibition have passed one million views. Weekend live tours on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, have drawn around 140,000 viewers.
The gift shop has followed. Plush toys based on the eye-rolling birds earned about RMB400,000 (US$59,000) in the first 20 days of the show.
What makes this stand out is how easily a very old style has slipped into phone culture. Visitors arrive knowing the meme and leave standing in front of the brushwork behind it. No wall text required.
The Nanchang show is only one part of a wider 400th anniversary. The National Art Museum of China in Beijing recently showed his work in an exhibition on his influence on expressive ink painting, freehand brush painting that favours feeling over fine detail, since the 17th century, including on later painters Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi and Pan Tianshou. Several museums in Japan staged commemorative shows earlier this year.
More is still to come. The Shanghai Museum in Shanghai plans a major Bada Shanren exhibition in December, with loans from the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC The Art Newspaper.
