Muqi Fachang

or Mu-hsi Fa-ch'ang

(flourished 13th century, Sichuan province, China) Chinese Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist painter. Toward the end of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), Muqi fled to a monastery near Hangzhou. He painted a variety of subjects—including landscapes, flowers, still lifes, and more orthodox iconographic subjects. The most famous paintings associated with Muqi include Six Persimmons and a triptych with a white-robed Guanyin flanked on either side by a scroll of monkeys and a crane. The paintings vary in style and subject matter, but there is throughout a sense of immediate vision and a totally responsive hand, expressed with broad and evocative washes of ink. His paintings on Chan themes stimulated many copies in Japan.

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