Cheng Sui

Cheng Sui was born in 1605 in She County (Shexian), Anhui province, China. He is also known by the style name Muqian (Mu-Ch'ien) and the sobriquet Gou daoren, and appears in older Western scholarship under the Wade-Giles romanization Ch'eng Sui. He worked as a landscape painter, poet, seal carver, and calligrapher, and is associated with the Xin'an School of painting centered in his native Anhui.

Cheng belonged to the yimin, literati who refused to transfer their political loyalty from the fallen Ming dynasty to the new Qing rulers. Museum sources describe him as a man of great moral integrity, and his landscapes, built from dry, dark brushstrokes, are generally read as carrying a melancholic, loyalist undertone rather than serving as straightforward description. He died in 1691. No source located gives an exact day, month, or place of death, so those details are left unconfirmed here rather than assumed.

Cheng Sui, 1605 to 1691, should not be confused with Cheng Jiasui, 1565 to 1643, an earlier Ming dynasty painter with a similar romanized name whom auction houses and museums catalogue as a separate artist. A Catalan-language reference also flags a different, modern artist sharing the same name and born in 1981; that person is unrelated to the historical painter documented in this profile.

Modern critical writing specifically on Cheng Sui is sparse in the sources available. The Art Gallery of New South Wales situates him within the yimin loyalist literati and describes him as a man of great moral integrity, a framing that ties his biography directly to the reading of his brushwork as restrained and melancholic. His work at that institution was included in the exhibition "Glorious," shown from 27 May 2017 to 6 January 2019.

The market database MutualArt reports a record price of USD 961,029 for a work titled "Landscape Poetry and Paintings," sold at China Guardian Auctions in Beijing in 2025, though it gives no exact sale date and the figure has not been corroborated by a primary auction-house catalogue or a second independent source, so it should be treated as reported rather than confirmed. Christie's has separately listed a hanging scroll attributed to him, "Awaiting the Arrival of Autumn," with lot notes indicating a previous sale at Sotheby's London in 2007, but no hammer price is visible in the accessible listing. His institutional footprint, an ink landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired in 1962 and a winter landscape at the National Gallery of Victoria acquired in 1976, is the more reliably documented measure of standing for this artist.

Cheng Sui has no catalogue raisonne and no certificate-of-authenticity program; attribution rests on museum provenance, artist seals, inscriptions, and comparison with securely documented works. There is no current commercial gallery or estate representation on record, consistent with his status as a seventeenth-century painter whose work now sits primarily in public collections rather than in dealer inventory. Care should be taken with the name itself: Cheng Sui, 1605 to 1691, is a distinct artist from the similarly named Ming painter Cheng Jiasui, 1565 to 1643, and from any unrelated modern namesake, and the two historical figures should never be merged in provenance or market research. Finally, the one reported auction record, USD 961,029 via MutualArt for a 2025 China Guardian sale, has not been independently corroborated, so any market claim about this artist should be treated as unconfirmed until it can be verified against a primary auction-house record.