虎 虎

The Tiger is the guardian animal of Chinese childhood. Not the tiger of the mountain but 布老虎, the stuffed cloth tiger — sewn by a grandmother, given to a baby, set at the head of the bed to frighten off whatever might come for a child in the night. The four stripes on its forehead are read as 王, the character for king, which real tigers do carry and which folk artists have never once resisted painting in.

As a sign it is the one with the most voltage: courageous, competitive, charismatic, difficult to manage and impossible to ignore. Third in the race, and only third because the current was strong.

Xiang Li paints the toy, not the predator — three of them, a family, on the reddest ground in the collection. It is the single most cheerful painting of an apex carnivore you are likely to see.