Qiu Ying

Qiu Ying was a painter in the early 16th century, during the Ming Dynasty. Although he was born into a peasant family, he became a favorite painter of wealthy patrons, and was known for depicting exemplary elegant behavior. Although he experimented and employed a shockingly large variety of techniques, Qiu is well known as a master of the gongbi brush method, which is extremely precise and dates back to 200 BCE. Art historians continue to parse out Qiu’s paintings as the diversity of techniques and styles he embraced exceeds his contemporaries and calls for deep research and analysis of a man with little extant records.