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Beggars and Street Characters
Zhou Chen (Chinese, c. 1450–c. 1536)
1516
- Medium
- Handscroll; ink and light color on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 31.9 x 244.5 cm (12 9/16 x 96 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Chinese Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Zhou Chen from Suzhou provides rare depictions of impoverished people that once filled the city’s markets and streets. Despite Suzhou’s prosperity, its rapid growth polarized society, including the wealthy and those who had deserted their farmlands, who were without homes, unemployed, or sick. Amid these are figures who inspire fear rather than empathy. The painting may thus be informed by local practices at the end of the lunar year, in which street beggars, in exchange for food or money, would dress up like ghosts and demons to drive out evil forces.
