Bamboo and Insects (late 1100s): Art, History and Details

Bamboo and Insects (late 1100s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Wu Bing (Chinese, active 1190–1194).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Wu Bing, a native of Piling, gained Empress Li’s favor and served as a painter-in-attendance at the court in Hangzhou during the Shaoxi reign (1190–94). The round fan painting shows a dragonfly hovering over a stalk of bamboo, a bush cricket (luowei) perching on a leaf, and a flying wasp. Yellow leaf tips suggest the late summer or early autumn season. The chirping of the cricket sounds similar to the sound of a working loom; the insect is therefore also called weaving lady (fangzhi niang). The weaving season starts when the weather is about to turn cold—the cricket symbolizes early autumn.

Object facts

• Title: Bamboo and Insects
• Date: late 1100s
• Creator attribution: Wu Bing (Chinese, active 1190–1194)
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Album leaf; fan painting, ink on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 24.8 x 26.8 cm (9 3/4 x 10 9/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Album leaf
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1964.154

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wang, Chi-chʻien. Album Leaves from the Sung and Yuan Dynasties: [Exhibition], March 26 Through May 30, 1970. New York: The [China House] Gallery, 1970.
• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Chou, Ju-hsi and Anita Chung. Silent poetry: Chinese paintings from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.