Rock and tree

Chen Hengke was an influential historian of the literati tradition and a leader among painters and calligraphers in Beijing. He died before he reached fifty, but the many artists who were his friends and students, among them Qi Baishi (1864–1957), advanced his ideals.

This painting of a tree and a rock that Chen saw while on a walk is more a product of his imagination than of direct observation, which explains why, according to his inscription, one viewer thought the tree resembled a dragon:

There is this strange sight in the Central Park [in Beijing], but tens of thousands of tourists have passed it by, unnoticed. So I decided to paint it. A Buddhist-monk friend of mine asks, "What does it mean when a dead tree looks like a chanting dragon?" I have no answer.

(Wen Fong, trans., Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001], p. 148)