Developed during the mid-19th century in China, the bapo (or eight
brokens) painting genre combines ingeniously realistic depictions of
antique documents, such as calligraphies, rubbings, paintings and pages
from old books, sometimes alongside everyday contemporary ephemera,
including advertisements, receipts and postmarked envelopes. The
resulting, seemingly haphazard, overlapping compositions contain coded
reflections on the decay of cultural traditions, or wishes for the
recipient's good fortune. Widespread in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, bapo was never popular with the upper echelons of the Chinese
art world, and as a result was never recorded in art-history texts or
mentioned by cultural critics. It became a lost branch of Chinese
art--almost completely forgotten for the past 60 years.
This book explores the origins of bapo in Chinese visual culture and
traces how it blossomed into an intriguing and inventive tradition in
the hands of many artists.