The Five Colours of White

Ink-and-Brush painting by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In the glass-and-concrete halls of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, Zhang Shuqi’s work bursts with an urgency that belies its age. Echoes of the Homeland is a retrospective of a Chinese painter long overshadowed in the West. A native of Zhejiang Province, Zhang Shuqi (or Chang Shu Chi, 1900–1957) was hailed as one of the “Three Masters of Jinling” along with Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Liu Zigu (1901–1986), pioneers who adapted traditional ink-and-brush to a modern world. Amid the fourth-floor galleries, his flowering branches and roiling flocks of fowl feel like a living ecosystem, each petal and plume pulsing with the tensions of war, exile, and cultural survival.

For a millennium, literati painting depended on liubai (blank space) to suggest sky, water, or the Dao; empty paper was as meaningful as ink. Zhang reconfigured that balance. Known for his style of “White-Powder-ism” (the liberal use of white pigment, unconventional in Chinese art), he declared that white “also has five colours.” Refusing to let the blank page carry the entire burden of illumination, Zhang painted the light itself, layering white pigment over paper, bringing absence and presence into a tension.

“White Pistils” by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In "White Pistils," a cloud of white hydrangeas billows out of a charcoal-gray wash, sculptural and three-dimensional. Zhang stacks layers of translucent white pigment atop soot-gray ink, creating a puffed-up relief, a coral reef of petals achieved only with paint on paper. Even Zhang’s signature undercuts expectations; a traditional cinnabar seal sits on one side of the page, the Romanized scrawl “Chang Shu Chi 1957” on the other, a gesture to his international life.

That fusion is fully on display in "Competing in Beauty." Under a riotous canopy of red peonies, a white peacock steps out, its lace-like plumage painted with layers of frosted white ink that seem to glow from within. Even against the hot crimson of the flowers, the bird’s tail shines like carved alabaster. In a lesser hand, this might have slid into mere ornament, but the astonishing lightness of the white makes the peacock insist on its own life. Its long neck and beaded tail are alive with intent.

The war years added a darker texture to this trajectory, casting a long shadow over the Hangzhou galleries. In 1940, as Japanese air raids battered the wartime capital of Chongqing, Zhang was commissioned to paint a diplomatic gift for Franklin Roosevelt’s third term. The resulting scroll, "Messengers of Peace," now housed at the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, captures a hundred white pigeons crowding the silk in a frantic, suffocating rush. Painted in a temporary studio as bombs fell outside, a simple peace motif was dispatched as a diplomatic appeal. Sent to Washington, it became perhaps the first modern Chinese painting displayed in the White House.

Soon after, Zhang went to America as China’s cultural ambassador. On the West Coast, he taught and kept painting, though no longer depicting his homeland directly. He distilled memories into small tableaux of nature. A hanging scroll of chicks captures this change, where a clutch of baby birds tumbles out of the paper in a gray haze. Zhang abandons outlines altogether; blobs of ink bleed into one another, softening into pale down. The effect is quick and alive, evoking the breathless strokes that Western audiences watched him demonstrate in Life magazine’s 1943 two-page spread, producing complex scenes with dance-like agility.

Life article on Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

Across the hall, a companion scroll shows adult hens crowding a shallow bowl of water. Warm ochres and browns overlap in a restless groove, each bird pressed close to its neighbour. The rhythm is unhurried yet intimate; each head lowers to drink at a slightly different moment, forming a syncopated choreography. Free of farmyard idyll or propaganda, these scenes feel like private refuges carved out by exile. Zhang seems guided by a sense that these creatures have a right to exist for their own sake. A single dark hen on another scroll stands alone under a giant blue-green lotus leaf, the human world entirely offstage.

Even Zhang’s smallest formats live in this spirit. In a narrow panel, thorny orange roses rise to meet a butterfly poised on a petal. The colours of the petals, stem, and wings are vivid but never gaudy, like a sideways glance at a secret meeting.

Zhang’s paintings often operate as counterpoints. A scroll of towering sunflowers stretches skyward, their heavy golden blooms bowing under the weight of dense, dark seeds while two swallows slice through the bright air. The scene radiates a grainy resilience, life pressing upward out of brightness. In "Taro and Heron," by contrast, everything has weathered. A bird perches on a gnarled, bending lotus stalk beneath a drooping, decaying leaf that shelters it like an old umbrella. Below, small white blossoms rest serene amid the ruin. One image teems; the other sighs. Together they dwell in the contrast of abundance and decline, sun and shade.

Echoes of the Homeland suggests that an artistic tradition can migrate without losing its edge. By giving white pigment the weight of black ink, Zhang Shuqi allowed a millennium of brushwork to withstand the displacements of a fractured century. Hanging in the capital of his home province through July 23, 2026, these scrolls leave the impression of a world held together by the sweep of a brush and a pouch of white powder.

– Jason Wang is a writer and cultural critic based in Toronto. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge) and has contributed to Toronto Life, The Conversation, and the Literary Review of Canada. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University.