Fan painting of a Daoist magician

Wan Shouqi

c. 1650

Ink and color on paper

Minneapolis Institute of Art

An elderly man with a long beard and a child stand on a rocky outcrop, looking up at a dragon in the sky. The scene is rendered in muted colors on a fan. In this work, a Daoist magician stands on a bluff by a pond, with a small boy at his side. The bamboo stick he throws into the air is being transformed into a dragon. This illustrates a story from Daoist lore about Fei Changfang, a minor official of the Han dynasty, who studied the secrets of immortality with a Daoist master. One day the master gave Fei a stick of bamboo and told him to ride it. When Fei mounted the staff, he found he could travel great distances in an instant. When he tossed the stick over a pond, it turned into a blue dragon. Gallery G203 Gift of Ruth and Bruce Dayton