The work was painted with eight shrimps in total, all of them are animated. The painter, painted the eyes with thick ink and vertical dots, the head with horizontal brush, and above the head, tapped a little bit thick ink before the pale ink getting dried to form the natural surrounding colors, dense and light colors were alternatively and appropriately deployed; the shrimps’ torso, painted in light shade of ink, looked translucent. On the top left is the inscription of eight characters wrote by the painter himself “Xing Tang Lao Wu Hou Ren Bai Shi” (the name of his birthplace and his art name), under which is two seal “Mu Ren”(lit. wood man) in relief and“Wu Nian Ba Shi Qi Sui”(lit. I am 87 years old this year) in intaglio, and another seal on the lower right corner “San Bai Shi Yin Fu Weng” (lit. rich man with three hundreds stone seals).

Qi Baishi, a native to Xiangtan of Hunan province, is a great master of calligraphy, painting, and seal cutting of China in 20^th century. He devoted himself to painting, of which, the shrimp paintings are the most prominent, and he is extremely well-known in China. He has an intrinsic affection for shrimp, and all the shrimps he painted are vivid and animated. The shrimp bodies seem to be transparent, imbued with endless vitality.