Feng Tzu-k'ai (1898-), artist, essayist, and calligrapher, was best known for using traditional brush-drawing techniques to depict and comment on the contemporary scene.

A native of Ch'ungte, Chekiang, Feng Tzu-k'ai was one of ten children. His father died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother. After attending primaryschool, he enrolled at the First Normal School in Hangchow, Chekiang. There he came under the influence of a faculty member, Li Shu-t'ung (q.v.), who was a celebrated poet, painter, and calligrapher. Li had studied painting in Japan, and he encouraged his pupil's interest in art. After Li Shu-t'ung decided to become a Buddhist monk in 1918, Feng left the Hangchow school and went to Shanghai. In 1919 he married Hsu Li-ming, also a native of Ch'ungte. In Shanghai, Feng Tzu-k'ai and Liu Chihp'ing, another former pupil of Li Shu-t'ung, joined in founding a school to train teachers of art and music, the I-shu ta-hsueh [Shanghai college of art]. Feng later commented on their temerity in launching such an enterprise with little money and less experience. The only similar institution at Shanghai was the Mei-shu hsueh-hsiao [Shanghai art school], established in 1920 by Liu Hai-su (b. 1895), a young Kiangsu painter in the Western style. During this period, Feng read and lectured on Western art and studied Japanese in evening classes. Because he w-as aware of his professional limitations and anxious to broaden his experience, Feng Tzu-k'ai in the spring of 1921 left for Japan. His trip was financed by his wife's family, and he spent ten months in Tokyo. Feng became a student at the Hashikawa School of Western Painting. He also studied Japanese, English, and violin. Feng was interested in Western music and theater, and he made an effort to increase his knowledge of Western artistic and dramatic forms. He spent much time visiting museums and art galleries, and he frequented the theater and the cinema. After his return to China, Feng taught fine arts for a period at the Ch'un-hui Middle School at Shangyu, Chekiang. In 1926 he became an art tutor at Shanghai University and also taught fine arts, music, and aesthetics in middle schools in Shanghai. In addition, he joined the editorial staff of the Kaiming Book Company, which published his Hsi-jang mei-shu skih [history of Western art] in 1928. During the 1920's some of Feng's sketches were published in the Shanghai press. His earliest efTorts were tight, stippled panels in the manner favored at the time by some Western illustrators of children's books. But Feng quickly developed a more relaxed manner to express humorous observations of character and human behavior. A series of sketches of mischievous children, for many of which his own children served as models, first made him popular. Feng regularly made rough sketches as he walked the streets of Shanghai. He developed these sketches into drawings depicting everyday life : a family in a railroad station waiting room or a young couple having their baggage examined by customs officers. Two collections of his sketches of children were published by the Kaiming Book Company, Erh-t'ung man-hua [sketches of children] in 1925 and Tzu-k'ai hua-chi [a collection of Feng Tzu-k'ai's sketches] in 1927. Two years later, the same company issued another collection of his drawings, Tzu-k'ai man-hua chi [a collection of Feng Tzu-k'ai's cartoons]. Jen-chien hsiang [sketches of this human world] and Tzu-k'ai man-hua ch'uan-chi [complete collection of Feng Tzu-k'ai's cartoons] appeared in 1935 and 1946, respectively.

Early in 1929 Feng began collaboration with his former teacher Li Shu-t'ung, who had become one of China's outstanding Buddhist monks and who had adopted the religious name Hung-i. Feng prepared the drawings for the first volume of a collection of fables with Buddhist morals entitled Hu-sheng hua-chi [a collection of sketches of the floating life], for which the calligraphic text had been done by Hung-i. The first volume contained 50 drawings. A second volume, containing 60 drawings, was issued in 1940 by the Kaiming Book Company in association with the Fo-hsueh (Buddhist) Book Company. The drawings for the second volume were done at Ishan, Kwangsi, where Feng was teaching at the wartime campus of Chekiang University. Hung-i had been 50 when the first volume was published and 60 when the second appeared; the number of drawings in each equaled his age. In 1940 he wrote to Feng Tzu-k'ai to express his hope that this pattern would continue, with a new volume appearing each decade. Hung-i died in 1942, but Feng honored his teacher's wishes and completed a third volume of 70 drawings at Amoy in 1949-50.

Feng Tzu-k'ai was known in China as one of the most advanced Buddhist disciples of the monk Hung-i and as a painter and calligrapher. In addition to his collections of drawings, he published several volumes of essays and was regarded as a notable stylist. He also published translations of Turgenev's First Love in 1932 and Robert Louis Stevenson's Suicide Club in 1932, as well as works by Japanese authors. After the Central People's Government was established in 1949, Feng did no cartooning, though he reportedly continued to prepare drawings for the Hu-sheng hua-chi series. In 1955 the People's Fine Arts Publishing Company at Peking reissued his Tzu-k'ai man-hua chi, originally published in 1929. In 1956 Feng's study of the Japanese painter Sesshu (1420-1506), Hsueh-chou ti sheng-yai yü i shu [the life and art of Sesshu], was published at Shanghai. Two years later he edited and illustrated a collection of essays by Hung-i, Li Shu-Vung ko-ch'u. chi [songs of Li Shu-t'ung].

Feng Tzu-k'ai's importance in the history of twentieth-century Chinese art was that he was a pioneer in using traditional brush drawing to portray the people around him by direct observation. He commented, with a gentle smile born of his Buddhism, on the human foibles that he saw around him. His best drawings achieved sound characterization with skillful economy of line. Good examples are the sketch of a threeyear-old child in Tzu-k'ai hua-chi (1927) and his portrait of Lu Hsün's famous fictional character Ah Q_ in Man-hua Ah Q cheng-chuan, which he illustrated for the Kaiming Book Company (1939).