Zhong Kui's fiercest and best documented artistic portrait was painted not to frighten demons but to unsettle an emperor, or so the tradition around it claims. The Song to Yuan period painter Gong Kai produced a long handscroll, now known in English as Zhong Kui Traveling, or the Demon Queller's excursion, showing the scholar-ghost setting out with his sister and a disorderly retinue of grotesque attendant spirits, rendered with an expressive, almost caricatured looseness unusual for the period's court painting.
Art historians reading the scroll against Gong Kai's own biography, that of a Song loyalist living under Mongol Yuan rule, have argued that the demon-queller's exile-like procession works as veiled political commentary on dispossession and survival under a conquering dynasty rather than as straightforward religious illustration.
The painting survives today in an American museum collection and remains one of the most studied images of Zhong Kui outside the popular new year prints, valued specifically because it treats a stock protective figure as a vehicle for personal and political meaning rather than as a repeated household charm, a use of the demon queller's image that the door prints pasted up every winter never attempted.