Feng Tze Kai (; November 9, 1898 – September 15, 1975) was an influential Chinese painter, pioneering manhua () artist, essayist, and lay Buddhist of 20th-century China. Born just after the First Sino-Japanese War and dying just before the end of the Cultural Revolution, he lived through much of the political and socioeconomic turmoil during the birth of modern China. Much of his literary and artistic work comments on and records the relationship between the changing political landscape and ordinary people's daily lives. Although most famous for his paintings depicting children and the multi-volume collection of Buddhist-inspired art Protection for Living Beings (), Feng was a prolific artist, writer, and intellectual who made strides in the fields of music, art, literature, philosophy, and translation.
Biography Early life and education A native of Shimenwan () in Chongde county, Zhejiang Province, Feng Zikai went to school from an early age, the only son and youngest of eight children of a relatively wealthy and educated family. The Fengs owned a dye shop, a business made somewhat profitable due to the great number of waterways and trade networks that passed through Shimenwan. Shimenwan lay between Hangzhou and Suzhou, which connected the small, rural town to Beijing and Shanghai. Despite this, Feng Zikai's father mostly ignored the dye shop, preferring to study endlessly for the civil service exams in Hangzhou that still mostly dictated one's ability to rise on the economic ladder. Ignoring the family business like his father, but also lacking interest in a traditional Confucian education, Feng became fascinated with art as a child. His father finally passed the provincial exams in 1902, but shortly after that, Feng's grandmother died, initiating the traditional three-year mourning period for Feng's father. By 1905, the civil service exams system was abolished. With no path left for him to take the final exams in Beijing, Feng's father spent his time drinking, smoking opium, and tutoring his only son. This focus on Feng, a byproduct of being the family's sole male heir, made him stubborn and strong-willed. The townspeople doted on him, most likely due to his father's mild reputation for passing the provincial exams, and called him "young master" (). Feng's stubbornness manifested in determination to pursue his own interests, most notably drawing and painting. Often shirking his lessons with his father, Feng was captivated by the illustrations and woodblock prints in his father's Confucian classics. He stole pigments and dyes from the family store and colored in many of the illustrations, earning him his father's scolding and punishment. Shortly after his father's death from tuberculosis in 1906, Feng happened upon a book of figures, and practiced tracing and drawing figures, using the book as his guide and reference. He continued to pursue his obsession with tracing figures throughout elementary school, earning a growing reputation as the "Little Artist".
In 1914, Feng traveled to Hangzhou to enroll in the Zhejiang First Normal School (now Hangzhou High School), where his career in art took off. The school aspired to manifest the new educational values of the Republic of China and had the highest funding of any provincial school at the time. Many great artistic and literary figures of 20th-century China were educated there, such as Pan Tianshou, Lu Xun, Ye Shengtao and Xia Mianzun. Like many other parents, Feng's mother, recognizing his budding literary talent, encouraged him to attend a school that offered a degree in the humanities in hopes that he would become a man of letters. This education prepared him to become a teacher and give him a solid training in the Chinese classics. In line with traditional social expectations and standards, a career pursuing education and literature was preferable to most anything else, but especially one of trade. Furthermore, Feng's mother wished to see him follow in his father's footsteps, still hoping that the civil service examinations would be reinstated. He entered the school with aspirations to become a teacher, but the school, led by principal Jing Hengyi, emphasized moral and artistic education. It particularly espoused Neo-Confucian ethics and social duties, striving to instill in students a sense of civic duty. Jing and his family had been advocates of educational and political reform, and his leadership soon attracted a cohort of talented and devoted students and faculty, including many literary and artistic figures who became quite renowned. The school's core philosophy was moral education, encouraging and training students to be the new vanguard of social reformers.
In his third year, Li Shutong, who later took up the robes and be known as Hong Yi, taught Feng's music and art classes. Li studied Western painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Art and was infamous for trying to introduce nude painting into the Chinese arts curriculum. More importantly to Feng's development, Li emphasized sketching, not tracing, when teaching students to draw, and encouraged them to draw inspiration from the French En Plein Air. From Li, Feng learned the importance of combining moral character () with artistic accomplishment (). This later became a theoretical and methodological foundation for Feng's style of painting. In contrast to Feng's parents, Li encouraged him to pursue his artistic instinct and later was a profound religious influence on him.
Pre-1949 artistic and literary career After graduating from Hangzhou High School in 1919, Feng realized that his meager two years of artistic education had ill prepared him for a life as a professional artist. He was also newly married to Xu Limin, the daughter of a prominent family from Suzhou, and his mother was sick. The financial responsibilities of being a husband and the sole son weighed heavily on his mind. Two of her former classmates started an art school, and shortly after graduation, Feng moved to Shanghai to work as an art teacher. There, he accepted a part-time position as an instructor at the Chengdong Girls' School. Like many other patriot-intellectuals, such as Cai Yuanpei and Liang Qichao, Li Shutong espoused modern reform values. He believed that a new art articulated by modern educated cultural activists was key to reviving Chinese culture and artistic modes of expression. With the May 4th Movement fresh in students' minds, Feng brought these values to the classroom as a teacher. But he grew despondent due to lack of confidence in his ability to teach. In light of all the artists and teachers who had studied abroad, Feng felt he could not claim the title of a modern artist. Thus, after scraping some money together, he left for Tokyo in spring 1921. By this time, Japan was enjoying the benefits of both the Meiji Restoration and being a victor in World War I, and was a haven for Chinese students hoping to receive a modern education. Feng devoted his time to Japanese and European art, as well as attempting to learn violin, English, Japanese, and Russian. He immersed himself in Kabuki theater performances, old bookstores, research groups, and reading groups. He later cited Takehisa Yumeji, whose work he first encountered in Tokyo, as a major figure in his intellectual development. After ten months, he ran out of money, and returned home with a renewed faith in the potential of ink paintings.
After Tokyo, Feng accepted a job at Chunhui High School in Shangyu, a town near Shaoxing. During this time he became part of the White Horse Lake literary group, named after the lake in Shangyu. He was ill at ease in this job, and when political movements clashed, he took it as an out and quit.
Feng became involved in the burgeoning political movements of his time. His classmates and colleagues invited him to be an essayist and artist for many of the radical magazines and publications that were popping up. Journals such as Aesthetic Education, New Youth, Literature Weekly, and Our July featured Feng's early literary and artistic work. Through these publications, his art started to gain traction in Shanghai's intellectual circles and his unique style of paintings came to be called manhua. Embroiled in Shanghai's political and intellectual world, Feng found his art naturally inclined to reproductive technologies and political periodicals. It also embodied the type of Chinese art that could propel the Shanghai intellectuals' wheel of political progress.
The Kaiming Shudian () (Kaiming Book Company) was a private capitalist venture established in Shanghai in 1926 whose goal was to introduce "new knowledge" to young adults. Feng taught art and worked as a cover designer and illustrator at the Kaiming Book Company as well as for other publishers. The Kaiming Book Company published many of Feng's art books and essays. The most important journal the company published for young adults was The Juvenile Student (), and as an editor and primary contributor to the journal, Feng disseminated his artwork, his concern for humanitarianism, and his aesthetic thought to many young students.Su-Hsing Lin, “Feng Zikai’s Art and the Kaiming Book Company: Art for the People in Early Twentieth Century China.” Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003.
Feng continued writing, painting, and publishing in various capacities throughout the changes in the Chinese sociopolitical landscape. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he drew cartoons depicting the horrors of war. His artwork stands out as unique, especially compared other artists of his time. He chose to not represent the Japanese antagonists as monsters or inhuman, but rather to focus on war's objective tragedies and the suffering it wreaks on ordinary people. Shen Bochen () was a political cartoonist whose art has been juxtaposed with Feng's cartoons during this period. Feng was a refugee during the war, having to flee his home, Yuanyuan Hall, but he remained committed to his ideals of universal humanism and compassion, as opposed to building nationalism against the Japanese aggressors.
Feng kept in close contact with Li Shutong until his death in 1942. Many of the Buddhist influences in Feng's work stem from Li's impact on Feng's spiritual journey. At the time, Feng was living in Hangzhou and frequently conversed with Ma Yifu, a prominent Neo-Confucian thinker and scholar.
Post-1949 career