Zouyu
One line of text, one creature, and what it takes to make a beast that has never been drawn.
In the land of the Lin there is a rare beast, large as a tiger, of five colours complete, with a tail longer than its body; its name is Zouyu, and to ride it is to travel a thousand li in a day. — Classic of Seas, Inner North
That is everything the text gives. Later painters made Zouyu a striped tiger with a long tail, and the image stuck. The atelier's method is to go back to the sentence: a tiger's mass, five colours, a tail that is the creature's largest fact, and speed. The form that answers those four constraints is the one in the collector set — and it looks like nothing you have seen, because it was made from words.
The same discipline governs every commission: the source is named, the reading is the artist's, and the object is new.
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