Cao Buxing

CHINA, Zhejiang, Huzhou; Eastern Wu Kingdom

Cao Buxing, also known as Cao Fuxing, was a painter from Wuxing (present day Huzhou, Zhejiang). Due to his impressive painting skills, he was renowned as one of the Eight Great Painters of Wu. Additionally, alongside Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420), Lu Tanwei of the Liu Song dynasty (420–479), and Zhang Sengyou of the Southern Liang dynasty (502–557), he was known as one of the Four Great Artists of the Six Dynasties (220–589). He was skilled in painting Buddhist figures, in addition to dragons and tigers.
Cao was well-known for the liveliness of his paintings. According to legend, Cao Buxing altered some ink stains on a screen into realistic depictions of flies. It is said that they were so lifelike that Emperor Sun Quan (reigned 222–252) of the Eastern Wu Kingdom tried to flick them away. In 247, when Emperor Sun Quan built Jianchu Temple in Jiangsu, Cao worked on some of the Buddhist murals based on samples that Kang Senghui brought back from India. This was known to be the beginning of Buddhist arts in the Jiangnan (region south of the Yangtze River). Since Cao’s Buddhist paintings were the earliest such paintings recorded in Chinese history, he is considered to be the patriarch of Buddhist painting.
According to Painting Annals of the Zhenguan Period, many of Cao’s paintings, including Dragon and Tiger Painting, were found in the royal palace of the Sui dynasty (581–618).