Qi Baishi, simplified Chinese: 齐白石, traditional Chinese: 齊白石, was a carpenter before he started for Chinese painting. He was also good at seal carving and called himself "the fortune of three hundred stone seals". (The given name means 'rock', and his family name happens to mean, as he prefered it to, 'equal'.)

All his works fairly demonstrate an essential part of Chinese culture; that is, the part of Taoism: to be close to the natural world, original. For the subjects of his paintings include almost everything, commonly animals, scenery, figures, toys, vegetables, and so on; and, it is clear, he held on firmly to one positive attitute towards all these things whereas the others may consider them in commonplace. He was an animal-lover, I believe; and, unbelievably he had managed to maintain a lovely character of a child, until he passed away.

His works such as his paintings, which may have been identified as strokes of whims, are but presentation of simplicity, masterly indeed. For none of his pieces leaves any evidence of that he was in hesitation .... No, he was not; he was, most likely, merged into the baptism of the natural world. And, meanwhile, there's great refinement in his work.

Thus, my read of him may have challenged some criticism such as the one from a western authority:"He is perhaps the most noted contemporary Chinese painter for the whimsical, often playful style of his watercolor works."

I made the windowpane of my studio by myself and used translucent paper to cover it, and I called my studio a Motif-Simplifier. For being a devout Taoist monk who had every duty in the advocacy of living a simple, natural life, and I was proud of the functioning of it. Having lit a lamp, its oil slightly fragrant mingled with the fragrance of the Chinese ink I had made for the art, I was in a mood half pious and half pensive, pacing up and down the studio ....

I did not know when there appeared on the paper a print-like of a branch of flowers in full blossom, standing distinctively out of the rhythmical pane and setting at the same time the rhythmicity as its background. Looking out of the window, I saw the moon hanging high, and the moonlight that made the whole scene, inside out, a world ethereal. I was absorbed, completely, then a bird outside passing through leaving behind a swift trance. "Should I then have an enlightened heart," I said to myself, musing, and made the two pieces.

One may wonder why it’s called Black Bamboo. It's metaphoric and has a unique story involved:

In a typical Chinese study there are constitutionally Four Treasures*: the Chinese brush (a bundle of the ones in different sizes); ink stick; the Chinese paper; and ink slab or ink stone (yan). The inkslab looks like a kind a pretty mini-pond. Each time when the artist is about to perform his art, he needs to put some water to the pond, then to grind the ink stick against the inkslab to produce the ink liquid for the art. When it is ready, the studio is full of fragrant smell coming from the liquid. The density of the liquid as well as the fragrance is highly associated with what the artist himself prefers to. The four lots as a whole has been used and practiced by Chinese intellectuals for thousands of years. No one knows when the intelligentsia was called, or they began to call themselves, “Ink Men”, as came the famous Chinese idiom, Wen Ren Mo Ke (Mo means the ink and Ke refers to gentleness of such a man, Moke "Inkman").

"Ink Men" were greatly pleased, for they stored up their spirit, through the demonstration of the ink: for instance, in some suffocating circumstances, they spared themselves well in the formless yet visible shelter of the ink. Here the very shelter is the black bamboo, for the straightness of line suggests independence, hollow center stands for broad-mindedness, the hard joints speaks integrity, and the leafy the trumpets.

* Wen-Fang-Si-Bao, a popular idiom saying in China, speaking of what's usually in a scholar’s study. Wen means the intellectual, Fang: a house or a studio, Si: refering to the Four, and Bao something priceless, Sibao refers to the Four Treasures.

"As to the training of pot plants, one should choose those with claw-like roots coming above the surface of the ground. Lop off the first three branches from the ground before allowing the next one to grow up, making a bend at every point where a new branch starts off. There should be seven such bends, or perhaps nine, from a lower end of a tree to its top. It is against good taste to have swollen joints at these bends, or to have two branches growing directly opposite each other at the same point. These must branch off in all directions from different points, for if one only allows those on the right and left to grow up, the effect will be very bare, or “the chest and back will be exposed,” as we say. Nor, for instance, should they grow straight from the front or behind. There are “double-trunked” and “treble-trunked” trees which all spring from the same root above the ground. If the root were not claw-shaped, they would look like planted sticks and would on that account be disqualified.

The proper training of a tree, however, takes at least thirty or forty years. In my whole life, I have seen only one person, old Wan Ts’aichang of my district, who succeeded in training several trees in his life. Once I also saw at the home of a merchant at Yangchow two pots, one of boxwood and one of cypress, presented to him by a friend from Yushan, but this was like casting pearls before swine. Outside these cases, I have not seen any really good ones. Trees whose branches are trained in different horizontal circles going up like a pagoda or whose branches turn round and round like earthworms are incurably vulgar."

-Translation by LYT

【Explanation of B1-3】:

The spiritual root is of Taoism.

I happened to find a good collection of works in print of the painter, and on the first page of that book there’s a sketch of him with a footnote, "The only picture in his life by someone anonymous" which indicates his peculiarity as spiritually a hermit. The picture demonstrates his bitter senile smile that springs up a stream of smugness spread over with secrecy. He looks emaciated as though like a ghost, yet his sunken eyes are sparkling and soft. It seeps into my mind and brings me to the verisimilitude between his appearance and the many stones he painted, the latter of which he called “Stupid Stones” – the rejected.

He once was an official and had then a good record in his ministry, which was rare; and a rarer thing did he carry out was his forsaking of the officialdom, that was considered eccentric. Yet, it is he who started a historic movement of Chinese Art Renaissance, and was distinguished the "crankiest" among the famous Yangchow Eight Eccentrics in China.

A bamboo person was he that saw bamboo representing his soul raptly: straightness of line suggesting independence; the hollow center standing for open-mindedness; and, the hard joints referring to integrity…? It takes an expert to decode his spirit and his personality, and I take bold to suggest that the picture as in B1-3 is perhaps a self-portrait of the painter himself: his soul that is in the representation of the bamboo and his flesh the stones are separated.

He's name is Zheng Banqiao (1693-1765) in Qing (or Ch'ing) dynasty (1644-1911).