Daozi—renowned Christian artist, art critic, poet, and professor at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University—passed into the arms of the Lord at 7:20 a.m. on September 1 in Beijing. He was 69.
When the news reached me, I was abroad. Sirens wailed through the early morning air in Pasadena, mingling with my stunned sorrow like a requiem I could neither silence nor name. Just two days prior, his daughter had messaged me to say he’d been moved to the ICU due to multiple organ failure. Standing then on a foreign street corner, I clasped my hands in prayer—as if I were grasping his hand through the distance. I could feel the ache of letting go, though prayer could not hold back the tide.
I first met Professor Daozi a decade ago, during the vibrant rise of Christian art exhibitions across China. Having curated a few myself, I found my heart increasingly stirred—not just to promote such work, but to enter into deeper study. When I heard that Professor Daozi was both an esteemed artist and a devoted believer, I went at once to Beijing Normal University, where his solo exhibition was being held.
That first encounter remains vivid in my memory. He carried a knightly spirit, expansive in presence, yet gentle in manner, his manner free of the aloofness common among intellectuals. I knew immediately: this was the mentor I had been seeking.
At the time, Daozi’s Santism Wash-Ink works were already well known. Trained not in art but in literature and aesthetics, he had first gained renown as a poet and critic, later joining the Tsinghua faculty in art history. After becoming a Christian in 1996, he began exploring Christian themes through ink painting.
True to the literati tradition of “text before image,” his was a poetic spirit transposed into brush and wash. But Daozi did not merely inherit that tradition—he challenged it. He once critiqued traditional Chinese literati painting as suffering from a chronic state of blood deficiency—a lack of the lifeblood of love and sacrifice, so preoccupied with self-cultivation and aesthetic detachment that it lost the theological density of love, sacrifice, and incarnation.
In contrast, Daozi believed Christian theology could infuse literati painting with a transcendent purpose. He envisioned Santism Wash-Ink not as a private expression but as a vessel of public truth—a medium for suffering and redemption. His work faced pain head-on, confronting not only personal grief but cultural and societal wounds. Yet always, he painted toward hope.
His faith, though rooted in Protestant belief, did not confine him. He drew freely from the wellsprings of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions alike. This openness bore fruit across borders. His work was featured at the 34th German Protestant Kirchentag in Hamburg and commissioned by the Catholic MISEREOR Foundation in Aachen, where his Lenten veil piece, God and Gold, was exhibited in over 3,000 churches across Europe. He painted sacred icons of angels in ink—acts of devotion that bore the unmistakable influence of Orthodox theology.
Daozi’s method was deeply meditative. He would read Scripture or theology in silence before painting, letting the word distill into movement. His works were visual psalms—saturated with transcendent imagination. In Pentecost, saints are filled with the Spirit, their hair flaring like tongues of fire—echoes of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: “To be redeemed from fire by fire.”
In The Road to Damascus, Paul’s fall is placed low in the painting’s darkened corner, while the skeletal horse in luminous blue suggests both the frailty of flesh and the transfiguration of soul. His Heartbeat of God series depicts three dancing flames—at once a Trinitarian mystery and an intuitive grasp of eternal life.
Daozi did not shy away from proclaiming his faith. His boldness drew curiosity and sometimes controversy. Many students and fellow artists came to Christ through his testimony. But some were also unsettled by his untamed ways. He smoked while writing. He belonged to no official church. He painted difficult themes: grief, injustice, even the cremation of a well-known intellectual’s ashes poured into the sea—candles in prison garb, angels crying lightning, an outcry for righteousness. One piece transformed a woman’s womb into chains forming a cross—a visual protest against gendered violence. These works, powerful yet “improper” to some, drew both admiration and critique.
Daozi’s passing was mourned deeply in the intellectual, artistic, and Christian communities. Friends, students, and strangers alike flooded social media with tributes. One scholar wrote: “He was one of the rare scholar-artists of our time—deeply learned yet humble as dust, dazzlingly gifted yet quietly grounded.”
His departure echoes through an entire era. But his legacy—his luminous theology of ink and breath—remains. In time, I believe his work will be seen not only as a chapter in the story of Chinese Christian art, but as a living witness to the sacred possibility of faith and form.
