(Excerpted from November 13, 1989 New York Newsday profile of Fei Mak by Jessie Mangaliman)

Baixia Cai is perhaps the best known of the Chinese shrimp painters. His paintings today fetch thousands of dollars. Mak says humbly, "Mine don't sell for that much."

But Mak has a reputation, in China and in the United States, for being a master of a traditional and dying art. People who know the art of Chinese brush painting know about Fei Mak. They speak of him and his paintings of shrimps in reverence.

Mak was born in Taishan, the town from which many of the first settlers of Manhattan's Chinatown came. He studied painting, Western painting as distinguished from the traditional Chinese arts, in Guangzhou.

Many of his paintings and drawings were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. In 1972, at retirement age, ¡K he took up brush painting, a traditional Chinese art, and decided to specialize in shrimps. There are brush artists who paint fish, but shrimp, because of its form, is considered the most difficult.

Like the American painter Georgia O'Keefe, Mak returned to the elemental, the basics. He has converted his bedroom into his shrimp studio, where, for three to four hours a day, he paints.

The free and stark brush strokes - a thin single line for the antenna of the shrimp, blobs of ink in grades of grey and black - suggest Oriental sensuality.

"I took up painting shrimps because it's one of the hardest things to draw," he said ¡K In New York, Mak found unprecedented freedom of expression.