Chinese Cabbages

Araki was not officially a student of Zhang Daqian, who did, in fact, have numerous students. Instead, Zhang accepted Araki as an informal mentee, and Araki visited him in Taipei two or three times a year. These visits often centered on food. Besides his mastery of the brush, Zhang Daqian was also an accomplished cook, and his oeuvre includes a number of paintings of assorted vegetables, including Chinese cabbages, mustard greens, mushrooms, and radishes, all vegetables that Araki also painted at one time or another in a similar style. Araki engages directly with Zhang’s vegetable paintings in this early work, in which he uses the brush only sparingly to draw the contours of the stalks of three Chinese cabbages and the veins of some of their leaves. The rest of the leaves are rendered in flourishes and splashes of ink and light color.