Odes of the State of Bin: The Seventh Month late 18th-early 19th century Fei Qinghu (Fei Zhaoyang) This album of twenty scenes depicts moments from In the Seventh Month,” a lengthy poem about the yearly agricultural cycle taken from China’s most ancient poetry collection, the Book of Odes (Shijing ??). Using the bright blue-green mineral palette associated in Chinese painting with antiquity, the artist Fei Qinghu created scenes of human labor in tune with the land: the reaping of crops in summer; the harvesting of ice in the winter; the performance of ritual offerings in the spring. In each of these scenes, small moments of human interaction share the stage with the drama of seasonal change.Fei Qinghu was among a group of Chinese painters who traveled to Nagasaki, Japan during the 1790s. There, he established relationships with artists and intellectuals, among whom interest in Chinese culture was surging. Fei established himself as a teacher and artist of some renown, and though he is