Lady Playing a Flute

Gai Qi, whose ancestry hailed from the Western Regions to settle in Songjiang (present-day Shanghai), was an adept painter of ladies and also flowers, bamboos with rocks and landscapes. He looked to the past for honing his skills, modelling his Buddhist images and ladies on Li Gonglin, Zhao Mengfu, Tang Yin and Chen Hongshou, not to mention other ancient masters for his landscapes and plants. Since he set himself a high standard when copying ancient masterpieces, he himself became an inimitable painter.

Adorably frail with dainty facial features and a slender figure, Gai Qi’s ladies are finely and precisely portrayed in controlled brushwork and in a restrained palette that is reminiscent of the past. This idealized and redefined norm that has come to be called the Gai School emerged at a time when paintings of ladies were gradually relieved of their moral purpose to become purely objects for appreciation, casting a long shadow on later practitioners of the genre.

The demure lady in the present painting sits ankles crossed on a peacock-blue stool and plays a flute with undivided attention. Her loneliness and melancholy are amplified by the blank background. So is the poignancy of the almost audible music. Without anything to distract, focus falls on the figure, be it her hair in loose buns, her red garment under a plain cloak or her skirt patterned with crane and floral medallions.

As much as a painter, Gai Qi was also a prolific ci-poet. In one surviving anthology alone, he has left behind as many as 155 lyrical poems on various subjects, including the one entitled “Playing the Flute under the Moon”, which is inscribed on the present painting. The same poem is also found on the painting Midnight Song, housed in the Shanxi Provincial Museum, which features a sad lady in half-length with a flute in hand. “Midnight Song” is the name of a ballad about love, the prosody of which has been adopted for 42 poems in Yuefu Shiji (The Poetry Collection of the Music Bureau) alone to express the joys and sorrows of a woman in love. In inscribing his painting with a similar poem, Gai Qi has set a wistful mood for his lady, who has to resort to music to dispel her loneliness, which is recurrent in his works.

(Entry written by Zhan Ni, in "The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Painting" p. 117 - 118, translated by Tina Liem.)