Ni Zan was a Chinese

Chinese people

The term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....

 painter during the Yuan Dynasty

Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...

. Along with Huang Gongwang

Huang Gongwang

Huáng Gōngwàng was a painter born during the late Song Dynasty in Changshu, Jiangsu. He is the oldest of the "four great masters of the Yuan." After serving as an official he acted as a Taoist priest. He spent his last years in the Fu-ch'un mountains near Hangzhou devoting himself to Taoism. It...

, Wu Zhen

Wu Zhen

Wu Zhen was a painter during the Yuan dynasty of China. He followed the Dong Yuan school of painting. Following along with trends of the time, Wu's works tended less toward naturalism and more toward abstraction, focusing on dynamic balance of elements, and personifying nature...

, and Wang Meng

Wang Meng (artist)

Wang Meng was a Chinese painter during the Yuan Dynasty. He was born in Huzhou , now known as Wuxing , Zhejiang....

, he is considered to be one of the four "Late Yuan

Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...

" masters.

Ni Zan was born into a wealthy family in Wuxi

Wuxi

Wuxi is an old city in Jiangsu province, People's Republic of China. Split in half by Lake Tai, Wuxi borders Changzhou to the west and Suzhou to the east. The northern half looks across to Taizhou across the Yangtze River, while the southern half also borders the province of Zhejiang to the south...

. His style name was Yuan Zhen (元鎮). His pseudonyms were Yun Lin Zi (雲林子), Huan Xia Sheng (幻霞生), and Jing Man Min (荊蠻民). He was born after the death of the Kublai Khan

Kublai Khan

Kublai Khan , born Kublai and also known by the temple name Shizu , was the fifth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire from 1260 to 1294 and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty in China...

, the Mongolian ruler who defeated the Song and established dominance over all that had traditionally been considered China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

. The Yuan rulers did not trust many of the Confucian scholars and instead preferred to instill Mongolians and Muslims to perform administrative tasks. Ni Zan was born into an elite who could afford to be educated despite the unavailability of high-paying governmental jobs that traditionally were the reward for a rigorous Confucian

Confucius

Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....

 education. These wealthy scholars and poets were often entertained by the eccentric Ni Zan and were part of a movement that radically altered the traditional conceptions of Chinese painting. Their paintings depicted representations of natural settings that were highly localized, portraying personally valued vistas that reflected their individual feelings.

During the 1340s a number of droughts and floods caused a famine throughout Ni Zan's region and subsequently lead to peasant revolts. These revolts reached a fever pitch in 1350 due to the government’s use of forced labor to repair the dikes on the Yellow River

Yellow River

The Yellow River or Huang He, formerly known as the Hwang Ho, is the second-longest river in China and the sixth-longest in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai Province in western China, it flows through nine provinces of China and empties into...

. Throughout the 1340s, the Yuan imposed oppressive taxes on the rich landowners of the region in order to cover the cost of these natural disasters. There are many divergent opinions concerning Ni Zan’s reaction to these taxes and his ensuing actions are unclear. However, it has been established that he distributed all of his possessions to his friends and moved into a houseboat. He left on the eve of the millenarianist Red Turban Revolt and traveled throughout the relatively peaceful southeast while various revolutionary parties tore through his region of origin. It was at this time that Ni Zan developed his distinctive style.

Ni Zan's landscapes after 1345 all take very much the same form - ink-monochrome painting of widely separated riverbanks rendered in sketch brushwork and foreground trees silhouetted against the expanse of water. These sparse landscapes never represent people and defy many traditional concepts of Chinese painting. Many of his works hardly represent the natural settings they were intended to depict. Indeed, Ni Zan used his art as a medium of expression. In 1364, he said “I use bamboo painting

Bamboo painting

Works of bamboo painting, usually in ink, are a recognized motif or subgenre of East Asian painting. In a work of bamboo painting in ink, a skilled artist and calligrapher will paint a bamboo stalk or group of stalks with leaves...

 to write out the exhilaration in my breast, that is all. Why should I worry whether it shows likeness or not?”

Ni Zan traveled around southern China during the fall of the Yuan and spent his time painting. During his lifetime, his work was highly valued and it itself was enough to pay for the hospitality provided by his friends as he traveled. He returned to his hometown in 1371 after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty

Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...

. It was in 1372 that he painted his Rongxi Studio, which epitomizes his style.

External links

• Ni Zan and his painting gallery at China Online Museum
• Met Museum