#week 127

This week we are happy to feature two creators, @marriedcas & @venhedish !

Sit back and enjoy as we bring you their works, and please remember to reblog & support them! 

Banner was made by the talented @everlarkingjoshifer

Here is week 127, folks. As always, thank you to these amazing authors who provide me with endless amounts of entertainment. You are all amazingly talented!

Readers-please make sure you show these authors some love! If you’d like to check out my previous posts, follow #rachel’s fanfic lists or search the tag on my blog. Happy reading!

Cavedweller - jennajuicebox aka @awkwardeverlark

Epiphany - @sfcbruce

Welcome Home - @historywriter2007

Look What Happens When You Agree To Babysit... - heilb

Seam Girls - ayyoufiction

On Borrowed Time - panskiss123

Welcome Home - @historywriter2007

Viewing the Waterfall by Zhang Daqian (张大千). Scroll, mounted on wooden board and framed, ink and colour on paper. 1963. 

Born in 1899 to an artistic family, Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) learned painting from his mother and siblings. In the late 1920s, Zhang became active in Beijing artists' circles, where he met Pu Xinyu, a well-known painter with whom he frequently collaborated. 

Viewing the Waterfall, painted in 1963 outside São Paolo, documents the evolution of Zhang’s style following his departure from China in the 1950′s. The painting evidences both his familiarity with the formal composition of traditional Chinese painting through its vertiginous verticality, while simultaneously employing an Abstract Expressionist vocabulary. 

She, A Chinese by Xiaolu Guo (郭小橹). 2009. 

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-British novelist, memoirist and filmmaker, who explores alienation, memory, personal and physical journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities. Her books, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China have received critical claims internationally. 

She, A Chinese follows the journey of a young woman from a remote Chinese village to London who in the end finds that "the west" – an idealised place of impossibly glamorous consumer riches – is just as tough as the place she left. Dedicated this film to Godard's La Chinoise, Guo reflects on her own cross-culture trajectory while weaving various socio-political elements into the storytelling.

Selected works by Irene Chou (周綠雲). 

Irene Chou (1934-2011) was born in Shanghai and studied economics at St. John’s University. She left for Hong Kong in 1949, and it was there that she began to learn painting formally under the tutelage of Chao Shao-an, a great bird-and-flower painter and master of the Lingnan school of painting. 

In the 1960s, Chou was introduced to expressionism and with inspiration from artist Lui Shou-kwan, she began to experiment with different techniques and different types of paint. Her style developed into a combination between western and Chinese art. 

Chou went through two dark periods in her life, also reflected in the themes and colours of her artwork. One was in the 1980s as a result of the deaths of her mentor Lui, as well as that of her husband, and the other due to a life-threatening stroke suffered in 1991. Following the stroke, she moved to Australia and in the new century, her artwork became more free and light-hearted, inspired by Aboriginal paintings and her then newfound interest in Buddhism. Chou passed away in Brisbane at the age of 87. 

Green Mountain After Rain. Xu Lei. Chinese ink and mineral colour on silk. 2014.

Xu Lei, born on 1963 in Nantong, Jiangsu, is a professonal painter and art director based in China. He studied ink painting at the Nanjing Art Academy and was a professional painter with the Jiangsu Institute of Chinese Painting. He was active in China’s innovative art movements in the 1980s. His paintings utilize classic, fine lines of gong bi and rarely contain human figures to evoke a sense of haunting isolation and loneliness in the contemporary world. His art style is detailed and elaborate, strongly influenced by traditional Song paintings, Ming period woodblock illustrations, Surrealism and conceptual art. Xu is currently working at the China Art Academy in Beijing and is the art director of the Today Art Museum as well as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Classics.

Image courtesy of Christie’s

Seashells (I) by Qin Zihao. 1952. Translated by Jeanne Tai in Frontier Taiwan - An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry.

Qin Zihao is the pen name of writer Qin Zhi. Of the minority Miao ethnicity, Qin was born in Sichuan and started publishing poems while attending a Sino-French university in Beijing, where he was widely exposed to Western poetry. Founder of the Blue Star Poetry Society, Qin’s achievements are numerous, and he was one of the most respected and influential figures on the poetry scene in Taiwan in the 1950s and ’60s. His complete poetry and critical essays were published posthumously.