Autumn Sails with Waterfall

According to an inscription hidden at the bottom, Fang Zhaolin painted this cartoonish work in her studio at Repulse Bay, Hong Kong, in the autumn of 1997, when she was eighty-three years old, to recall a trip made earlier in her life. Many of the artist’s later landscapes deliberately employed artless brushwork, overlapping forms, and vivid colors to depict a child’s dream-like world in bold compositions. Here, a waterfall in the center divides the autumn mountain into two halves and leads to the river at the foreground, where a few old-fashioned boats are sailing. The artist captured the joys of a small, rustic village by featuring groups of brightly clad figures in lively poses gesturing with their outsized hands.