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Gao Qipei [Kao Ch’i-p’ei; zi Weizhi; hao Qieyuan]
(b Mukden [now Shenyang], Liaoning Province, 1672; d 1732). Chinese painter of Manchu birth. Gao Qipei was born far north of the major centres of artistic activity in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. Consequently, he did not associate with the most important painters of the time, nor did he serve in the imperial painting academy. Nevertheless, he had a successful official career at the courts of the Qing-dynasty emperors Kangxi (1662–1722) and Yongzheng (1723–35), and his duties afforded him time to paint. Gao began to paint at a time when the two main schools of Chinese painting—the styles of the followers of Dong Qichang and the Individualists, such as Hongren—were suffering from a lack of originality. From the age of 20 Gao was anxious about establishing a distinctive style; he was constantly depressed, and reportedly took to bed with exhaustion. Gao’s solution, which allegedly came to him in a dream, was to paint with his fingers rather than with a brush. He used the balls of his fingers or his whole hand to apply washes and broad strokes; for lines he used a long fingernail which was split like a pen, but he also painted large landscapes with a brush. Although both the smaller-scale finger paintings and the more conventional brush landscapes were very popular at the court, it was generally accepted that his finger paintings had brought him renown—though, due to the supreme position of the brush and its techniques in Chinese painting, critics were at pains to champion his brush works. Since his finger-paintings met with so much success, and since he found it easier, with increasing years, to work with his fingers, he abandoned the brush completely, and consequently brush works by him are rare. Those that do survive, such as Landscape, a hanging scroll (undated; Taipei, N. Pal. Mus.), do little to support the critics’ enthusiastic assessment. They often demonstrate a high degree of technical prowess in the variety of brushstrokes, the calculated arrangement of dark and light areas of foliage, and the rhythmic patterns of mountain masses, resulting in a somewhat glibly academic painting devoid of spirit. Gao Qipei’s merits are more easily seen in handscroll paintings and album leaves executed wholly or in part with his fingers. Although these too, often rely on calculated pictorial devices, as in a leaf entitled Water buffalo from an album, Eight Scenes in Water (undated; Nanjing, Jiangsu Prov. Mus.), where the artist has suggested the visible forms of a swimming water-buffalo with two simple areas of ink wash, the effects are more appealing and appropriate to the subject.
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