Born just after the First Sino-Japanese War and dying just before the end of the Cultural Revolution, he lived through much of the political and socioeconomic turmoil during the birth of modern China.

A native of Shimenwan (石门湾) in Chongde county, Zhejiang Province, Feng Zikai went to school from an early age, the only son and youngest of eight children of a relatively wealthy and educated family.

The Fengs owned a dye shop, a business made somewhat profitable due to the great number of waterways and trade networks that passed through Shimenwan.

Despite this, Feng Zikai's father mostly ignored the dye shop, preferring to study endlessly for the civil service exams in Hangzhou that still mostly dictated one's ability to rise on the economic ladder.

With no path left for him to take the final exams in Beijing, Feng's father spent his time drinking, smoking opium, and tutoring his only son.

Many great artistic and literary figures of 20th-century China were educated there, such as Pan Tianshou, Lu Xun, Ye Shengtao and Xia Mianzun.

Like many other parents, Feng's mother, recognizing his budding literary talent, encouraged him to attend a school that offered a degree in the humanities in hopes that he would become a man of letters.

Jing and his family had been advocates of educational and political reform, and his leadership soon attracted a cohort of talented and devoted students and faculty, including many literary and artistic figures who became quite renowned.

The school's core philosophy was moral education, encouraging and training students to be the new vanguard of social reformers.In his third year, Li Shutong, who later took up the robes and be known as Hong Yi, taught Feng's music and art classes.

By this time, Japan was enjoying the benefits of both the Meiji Restoration and being a victor in World War I, and was a haven for Chinese students hoping to receive a modern education.

He chose to not represent the Japanese antagonists as monsters or inhuman, but rather to focus on war's objective tragedies and the suffering it wreaks on ordinary people.

[4] Feng was a refugee during the war, having to flee his home, Yuanyuan Hall, but he remained committed to his ideals of universal humanism and compassion, as opposed to building nationalism against the Japanese aggressors.

Shelley Drake Hawks attempts to recover Feng's career after the revolution using materials in the public domain, as well as interviews with his children and other close acquaintances.

She asserts that Feng was not "remolded" despite various reeducation attempts, but maintained his old beliefs and ideals even though he faced immense social and political pressure to become less "bourgeois".

Although Wang Zhaowen wrote an article in the People's Daily accusing Feng's manhua of unhealthy content, Premier Zhou Enlai praised his artwork and commissioned a compilation of it.

He was offered membership on the Standing Committee of the national Chinese Artists' Association and vice presidency of the regional Shanghai branch.

But as time passed, he felt he could no longer keep silent, writing essays that criticized the Great Leap Forward and other Party policies and initiatives.

His old home in Shimenwan has been converted into the Feng Zikai Memorial Center Archived 2018-06-15 at the Wayback Machine, where visitors can tour his old living spaces.

Furthermore, Professor Chen Xing founded and runs the Master Hong Yi and Feng Zikai Research Center at the Hangzhou Normal University.

Fo Guang Shan Monastery has converted Feng's Paintings for the Preservation of Life into religious murals that decorate the walkways up to their museum.

But Feng drew from many different sources, ranging from Chinese and Western art theory to Buddhism and Confucianism, in order to formulate a philosophy of aesthetics as ethics.

His philosophy finds parallels in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other post-Kantian European philosophers who have noted a connection among art, play, work, and children.

Feng critiqued many social injustices and hypocrisies, such as lack of filial piety, the innumerable people living in poverty, and the use of Chinese Buddhist ritual for 'transactional karma'.

His works include Writings from Yuanyuan Hall (缘缘堂随笔), Paintings for the Preservation for Life (护生画集), A Collection of Feng Zikai Manhua (丰子恺漫画集), a biography of Vincent Van Gogh (梵高生活), and a translation of The Tale of Genji.

He also illustrated some of Lu Xun's works, such as The True Story of Ah Q, and delivered a series of lectures of Western Classical music, focusing on Russian composers post-Tchaikovsky.