Eastern Jin painter, founder of Chinese figure painting
A painter of the Eastern Jin, revered as the first recorded master in the history of Chinese painting. He held that in painting a person what matters most is not likeness but capturing the spirit — and the spirit lies above all in the eyes. His surviving copy of the Nymph of the Luo River scroll, in lines flowing "like a silkworm spinning silk," paints the longing, never-to-be-fulfilled meeting of the poet Cao Zhi and the goddess of the Luo, setting a thousand-year model for Chinese figure painting.
When Gu Kaizhi painted figures, he would often finish the whole body yet long delay putting in the eyes. Asked why, he said: whether the limbs and form are painted beautifully hardly matters; a person’s spirit is all in these eyes. This care — like "adding the eyes to bring the dragon to life" — spoke what Chinese painting sought from the very start: not likeness of form, but likeness of spirit.
Gu Kaizhi’s originals are all lost, and what survives are later copies; the difference between them and the originals is a long-discussed question in painting history, which this site notes.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.