[This post dredged up a totally irrelevant memory. In middle school I had an art teacher named Hui Ming Wong. He was the real deal, even down to the detail of his ever-present pipe, which never left his mouth, except for emphasis. It was Parents’ Night, and I was dutifully leading my parents around from class to class. In the art studio I introduced her to Mr. Wong. His specialty was watercolor, and at least on a rudimentary level, resembled to work of Chang Dai-chien. I’m not sure why, because she was a gym teacher, not an artist, she took the occasion as an opportunity to expound effusively on the intricacies of Chiese watercolor and Mr. Wong’s obvious mastery of the technique. He listened patiently? indulgently? as she droned on, climaxing by pointing towards one of the paintings and asking “And what’s the title of this painting?”
Hui Ming gave a few more sucks on his unlit pipe, before pulling it out and answering in haltering but definitive English “Quiet as an Earthworm’s Fart.” That also described my mother’s reaction.
This documentary is definitely going on my Must Watch list. SB SM]
https://dreaminginjapanese.substack.com/p/of-color-and-ink-chang-dai-chien
Jun 07, 2026
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Imagine stepping into the painting: monumental lotus panels nearly twelve feet high, huge leaves larger than the human torso, stalks drawn in single gestures the length of an arm. The blossoms seem pink and luminous against dark water, trembling in the wind. Yet everything—flowers, leaves, reflections—was painted entirely with black ink.
A perfect place to walk around. I can see myself tiptoeing through the lotus pond, pushing aside the stalks as I travel deeper and deeper into the painting. I can smell the centuries old ink and hear the lotus pickers on their rowboats off in the distance. I have wanted to see these paintings, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian), for two decades. But where are they now?
It’s sad when works like this disappears into private collections.
I couldn’t stop thinking about these paintings, when a few days ago I finally had the chance to see Of Color and Ink. The documentary film, about the later life journeys of the artist, Chang Dai-chien, was created by Weimin Zhang, who spent years following in the artist’s footsteps when he traveled around the world—from South America to Europe and finally on to Taiwan.
They were famously displayed in Paris in 1956, when Chang met Picasso and the two became fast friends. The media at the time referred to Chang as the “Chinese Picasso,” but I think Chang made Picasso look like an amateur!
What a splash he made! The great artist was widely seen walking the streets of Paris in clothing popular centuries earlier. In what people called his Song dynasty robes and Dongpo hat, he also carried a long wooden cane and had a beard reaching down to his chest. The people of Paris went crazy for him—he is also said to out sell Van Gogh.
I’m not sure if they are including his many forgeries in that sales figure—since the great man is known as much for his spectacular brush work as he is for his fakes of famous lost paintings— which are even now hanging in major museums around the world.
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I hope I am making a case for Chang Dai-Chien: the novel. Because yeah, someone who can read Chinese should really write a story about his life.
I sometimes divide people into those I’d want to be characters in a novel and those I wouldn’t. My husband says this is my main method for insulting people! And I guess it is kind of true since I sometimes turn my nose up and say, “Well, no one is going to include that person in their novel!” hehe!
Well, Chang would make the perfect protagonist for a novel I mean, he was even kidnapped by bandits, walked around in his flashy silk robes and had a pet gibbon!
The documentary, which I highly recommend, begins after Chang has left Mainland China in 1949. First traveling to Hong Kong, he then wandered around India. The political climate in China made it impossible for him to work as he wished. So he cast about for a place to emigrate. And for several reasons that seem vague at best, he zeroed in on Peron’s Argentina, a place where many immigrants landed. And there he found land in Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes.
The artist would have many homes— even one in Carmel, in California, named the good enough place 可以居.
But it was his home in Brazil that I was most interested in—and the one the film maker kept returning to. Mogi das Cruzes, outside São Paulo, is where he went after Argentina and it was where he lived for almost fifteen years.
What was so incredible was that Chang, longing so much for his homeland, a place he felt he could not return to, turned inward. Instead of fitting into his new home, he instead dug in his heels and created his own version of China in Brazil, spending a huge amount of money to construct an artificial lake and a traditional Chinese garden which he called Pa Teh Yuan 八德園— the Garden of Eight Virtues. While many exiled artists preserved their home landscapes in memory, Chang went one step further, constructing a vast garden with a lake and five pavilions in order to replicate, as far as possible, the Chinese landscape he loved.
I think it must have been part memory, of his beloved childhood home in Sichuan but also part idealized imagination. He chose the land in Brazil very deliberately and told people that it resembled where he came from in China.
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I am really interested in artists who withdraw from the “real world,” and turning inward create a total work. Home, garden, studio, life: it all becomes part of the artist’s worldview. I first became fascinated by these “total works of art” when visiting Monet’s garden, studio and home in Normandy at Giverny.
And I have fantasized about this ever since.
Actually my obsession pre-dates Monet. When I was still in junior high school, I fell in love with Vita Sackville-West’s world that she built on her property in Sissinghurst aftre seeing photographs and reading about her home and garden. Taking inspiration (I assume) from her close friend Virginia Woolf in creating “a room of one’s own,” Vita had a glorious “room with a view” at the top of a tower filled with books!! A tower like the great Montaigne had in the Dordogne. Or like Melville had in Massachusetts.
Chang Dai-chien understood this need to withdraw from things. But he did more than step away from society spending years actively working to create a personal vision of the world that was perfect for him to live inside. Over the course of his later wanderings around the world, every house he built became a kind of inhabitable painting—part retreat, part theater, part memory palace.
He eventually would feel the pull of his homeland, but decided to end his days in Taiwan, where he created yet another private world. Called the Abode of Maya, named after the mother of the Buddha 摩耶精舍. Chang designed the two-story, courtyard-style building and the matching Chinese-style gardens himself. Perhaps that is what certain artists finally attempt: not merely to paint the world, but to build one spacious enough to live inside.
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