Zhu Qizhan, courtesy name Qizhai, art name Erzhan Laomin, was a native of Taicang, Jiangsu province.

In 1917 he studied Western oil painting with the prominent painter Fujishima Takeji (1867-1945) at the Kawabata Art School in Tokyo.

Zhu Qizhan was born into a wealthy merchant family with a fine collection of Chinese painting in Taicang, Jiangsu province.

In 1917 he left for Japan to study Western oil painting with the prominent painter Fujishima Takeji (1867-1945) at the Kawabata Art School in Tokyo.

Under its influence, he left behind the literati intellectual style, and founded his work on the more basic expressions of artists who arose from the common people, like Qi Baishi (1964-1957).

In studying Western oil painting, Zhu responded to the strong, sensuous use of color evident in the works of Post-Impressionist artists such as Cézanne, van Gogh and Matisse.

Infused with the Western ideas he was exposed to in Japan, Zhu combined them with the new artistic developments emerging from China's burgeoning nationalistic identity.

[4] At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Zhu Qizhan, at the age of 75, had to report to the Shanghai Painting Academy every morning.

He traveled to different places and sketched using the plein air method with Chinese ink and brush in the 1950s.

[8] Additionally, a one-man show of landscape paintings was held at the Research Institute of Chinese Art in New York City.

[13] In the final two years of his life, Zhu Qizhan was fortunate to witness worldwide appreciation for his lifelong devotion to art.

He was present in May 1995 for an ultimate tribute from the Chinese government, the opening of the Zhu Qizhan Museum of Art in Shanghai.

34–35)[15] Zhu Qizhan's style is marked by a vigorous and powerful presence with a great depth of expression to each brush stroke.

[17] "In evolving his use of strong colors, Zhu Qizhan also paid homage to the heavy pigments of the traditional blue and green style.

By means of skillful harmonies of colors, which like music is vibration, he achieved nature’s innermost force."

The form-building property of Zhu’s color manipulation is an artistic venture never previously attempted in the history of Chinese painting."

(Chu, 1994, p. 67)[5] "Zhu Qizhan’s art embarked from both the linear and aerial perspective of which he is so much aware in his experience as a painter of Western style.

(Chu, 1994, p. 71)[5] Zhu Qizhan's brushstrokes are accentuated with contrast, variation, and rhythmic sequences, which related his musical cultivation.

(Chu, 1994, p. 54)[5] Together with Lin Fengmian (1900-1991), Wang Geyi (1897-1988) and Tang Yun (1910-1993), Zhu Qizhan traveled to Jingdezhen, Jiangxi and Jiangsu in October 1964.