Born Qiu Bizhen, she began using the name Qiu Ti (sometimes written as Qiu Di) in the early 1930s, and later signed her work with the anglicised name Schudy. In 1920 she entered the Fuzhou Women’s Normal School, where her artistic promise was soon realised, and with three classmates formed a group known as Four Talented Women of East Fujian. She graduated from the Western Painting Department in the Shanghai Academy of Art in 1928, and later, studied in Japan at the Tokyo East Asia Japanese Language Professional School (Tokyo Tōa Nihongo Senmon Gakkō) and the Tokyo Pacific Ocean Art School (Taiheiyō Bijutsu Gakkō).
The trajectory of Qiu Ti’s career shifted in 1932 when she met Pang Xunqin (1906-1985), a modernist painter and founder of the Storm Society (Juelanshe). Within the year they were married.

As advocates for and practitioners of modernist techniques, members of the Storm Society sought to bring the Parisian modernist style to Shanghai. Qiu Ti showed three paintings at the four group exhibitions held by the society, including Flower, which received the prize awarded at the second Storm Society exhibition in 1933. The work was widely reproduced in a number of magazines; now lost, Flower exists only in reproduction.

Many of Qiu Ti’s canvases are no longer extant, as the majority have been destroyed or lost to time; in fact, only two original paintings survive from the Storm Society period, one of which is her Wild Chrysanthemums (Still Life). Set against a bright, almost aquatic background, the flowers in Still Life are reduced to their simplest form. While she primarily painted still lifes, Qiu Ti was a versatile artist, exploring subjects including portraiture, the female nude (Untitled, c. 1933) and landscape (West Lake in Autumn 1946).

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) took a significant toll on Qiu Ti’s career. In order to support her husband and family during the war, she largely suspended her painting practice. When she did paint, she abandoned her en plein air painting practices and returned to her earlier focus on still lifes, but she never found the same level of critical success she received in her early career. Despite this decline, Qiu Ti was an early harbinger of modernist art in China.

As one of the only two female members of the Storm Society, China’s most recognised avant-garde art group of the early twentieth century, Qiu Ti was also the sole recipient of the only award presented by the organisation, a testament to her talent as a painter and her contributions to the development of modernist art in early twentieth-century China.