Qiu Ti
Qiu Ti, born Qiu Bizhen was a female Chinese modernist oil painter. She was one of the only female members of the avant-garde art organization, Storm Society, which advocated for participation in the modernist art movement in China during the 1930s.
Personal life and education
Qiu Ti was born in 1906 in the small town Xiapu in the Fujian of China. She first enrolled in Xiapu County No. 1 Primary School in 1911, then in 1915 transferred to Xiapu County Girls' Middle School. In 1920, Qiu Ti entered Fuzhou Women's Normal School and dedicated herself to oil painting. She graduated from the Women's Normal School in 1925. After graduating, Qiu Ti married an unknown man with the surname Lin and together went to Beijing where Qiu Ti studied at the Beiping Art Academy while her husband studied economics at a different institution. Not long after moving to Beijing, Qiu Ti fell ill and returned to the south where she moved to Shanghai and enrolled in the Western Art Department at the Shanghai Art Academy. Qiu Ti graduated from the Academy in 1928 and traveled to Japan to attend the Tokyo East Asia Japanese Language Professional School and Tokyo Pacific Ocean Art School.At the end of 1929, she returned to Shanghai and became a researcher in the oil painting department at the Shanghai Art Academy. Not long after, Qiu Ti and her husband divorced. In the fall of 1932, Qiu Ti attended a solo exhibition of Pang Xunqin and met him. They soon after had a love affair. By the following year she had experienced a failed pregnancy and became a member of the Storm Society, founded by Pang Xunqin prior to meeting Qiu Ti.
She died in 1958.
Career
In 1930, Qiu Ti returned to China after studying abroad in Japan and began blending post-impressionist art techniques with the delicate art styles from China to create her own art style. Qiu Ti's style was more modern, challenged conservative concepts, and free-spirited. By 1934, three major Shanghai magazines had published pictures of Qiu Ti.Qiu Ti's artwork that are still extant are oil paintings of landscapes or still life. Taking from post-impressionist techniques, her brushstrokes, which are short and round, are painted diagonally. The middle ground in her artworks had a composition that was commonly used in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Qiu Ti's painting style was characterized by the mixture of Western brushstroke techniques and Chinese landscape composition.