Monkey 猴

The Monkey is the trickster: the fastest mind in the cycle, endlessly inventive, incapable of leaving well enough alone. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Journey to the West, steals the peaches of immortality, erases his own name from the ledger of the dead, and fights the entire celestial bureaucracy to a standstill. Monkey years have a reputation for being eventful.

The animal in the painting is a real and specific one: the golden snub-nosed monkey 金丝猴, blue-faced and orange-coated, native to the same mountain forests of Sichuan and Shaanxi as the giant panda, and endangered alongside it.

Three generations, one heart, one peach — the peach of long life. It is the family painting of the collection, and it sits in the same tradition as Xiang Li's pandas.