Beyond landscape : the roles of Ni Zan and Sheng Mou in framing the canon of Yuan landscape paintings

Abstract

The Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) witnessed a radical reinterpretation of landscape painting. While artists, retroactively referred to as literati, are generally deemed as the major driving force who gave new definition to Yuan landscape painting by emphasizing its expressive quality, little attention has been paid to the contribution of professional artists in shaping the development of landscape paintings in the Yuan era. By comparing the landscape paintings created by two late Yuan painters, Ni Zan (1301-1374) and Sheng Mou (active ca. 1340-1365), this dissertation will move beyond the examination of pictorial elements to analyze the painters’ roles in framing the canon of landscape painting in the Yuan dynasty. I will begin my thesis by asking: is it difficult to distinguish literati painters from professional painters? An exemplary scholar artist, Ni depicted landscapes in his iconic “one river, two banks” compositional style by using clean expressive brushstrokes. Sheng, on the other hand, was a professional painter who not only painted a large variety of subjects, but also both scholarly and professional painting styles. Looking into earlier texts and painting colophons written by Yuan elites and art critics, I argue that the scholar-professional categorization of painters is arbitrary and it is inappropriate for us to define painters only based on their painting styles. In the late Yuan Jiangnan region, the art market had a growing interest in scholarly paintings. Both Ni and Sheng were ambitious painters who aspired to be identified as scholarly through their innovative creations of artwork.