Krista Tippett
百鳥朝鳳 “A hundred birds pay homage to the phoenix”
Krista Tippett is an American journalist and author. She created and hosts the public radio program and podcast On Being, which takes as its subject what it calls the animating questions at the center of human life: what does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?
In 2014 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Fei has been listening to Krista since 2003, and interviewed her in 2016. Xiang has never met her. She built her understanding of Krista from photographs, from the program, and from her daughter — and then gave the painting a title that says what she made of her.
Xiang Li on the title
百鳥朝鳳 is an old subject in Chinese painting: every bird in the world comes to the phoenix. It is not a compliment about beauty. It is a description of a person other voices gather around.
Go and find them
This page is about the painting. Their own work is better.
Their books
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An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
What is in this painting
Xiang Li builds a portrait out of creatures. Each one is a claim about the person sitting among them.
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1 The title, in her own hand
Written top right with her seal: a hundred birds pay homage to the phoenix.
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2 The phoenix
Rising on the left, calling, its tail filling a third of the silk.
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3 The earth
A blue-green globe where a sun would be — the reach of the program, and its subject.
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4 Cranes
Coming in from the right in formation. In Chinese painting the crane carries longevity and the scholar's integrity.
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5 The hundred birds
Songbirds crowding the top right corner, arriving.
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6 The peacock
Perched and watching, on the right, at her shoulder.
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7 Peonies
She is up to her shoulders in them. The peony is the flower of honor and abundance, and it is what a Chinese painter gives someone she wants to praise without saying so.
The painting, out in the world
