Bada Shanren

Who was Bada Shanren?

Bada Shanren was a Chinese painter of shuimohua and a calligrapher. He was of noble lineage, being a descendant of the Ming dynasty prince Zhu Quan. Art historians have named him as a leading painter of the period.

Bada Shanren, a purported child prodigy, began painting and writing poetry in his early childhood. About the year 1644, when the Ming emperor committed suicide and the Manchu army from the north attacked Beijing, the young Han man sought refuge in a Buddhist monastery. Because he was a Ming prince, the dynastic upheaval created a great amount of uncertainty for his position in society. As years passed and the Qing dynasty became more firmly established, there was less and less insecurity among the Qing regime about remaining Ming loyalties and possible future rebellions. Due to these more stable circumstances, after 40 years, Bada Shanren deemed it acceptable to leave the monastery and to re-enter day-to-day life among society. In the aftermath of a nervous breakdown that could have been staged to avoid retribution for his family background, Zhu Da abandoned his monastic life and developed a career as a professional painter, adopting a series of descriptive pseudonyms, most notably Bada Shanren by which he is most often known today. Bada Shanren is believed to have a mental illness. He is said to have screamed and made weird sounds while painting. The stylized vertical writing of his pseudonym Bada Shanren looks like the characters for laugh and cry, thus by signing his paintings he implied his confusion and feelings of grief for the fate of his country and home.