Seeing the Spiritual Turn of Yuan-Dynasty Painting through Ni Zan: Professor Luo Yanzi on Why Literati Painting Came into Maturity in the Yuan

Edited Interview Transcript 2

In the previous section of my conversation with Professor Luo Yanzi on Fan Kuan and Song landscape painting, we discussed how the great achievement of Song painting rested on a profound apprehension of the order of nature. Whether in the monumental, stele-like composition of Northern Song landscape or in the spatial ideal of landscapes “fit to be wandered through and inhabited,” Song painting was consistently addressing one central question: how human beings might situate themselves within the vastness of Heaven and Earth, and how, through an understanding of the structure of mountains and rivers, they might establish a relation between spirit and order.

Yet it was precisely after this moment of high maturity that Chinese painting underwent a marked turn in the Yuan dynasty. Continuing from the previous discussion, I asked Professor Luo: if Song landscape painting centered on apprehending and presenting nature, then what exactly changed in Yuan painting?

Professor Luo’s answer was very clear. In her view, the most fundamental difference between Yuan painting and Song painting lies in the emergence of individuality. When Song painters confronted mountains and rivers, their first concern was how to give full expression to the grandeur of nature, the richness of landscape, and the force of Heaven and Earth. Yuan painters, by contrast, became less attached to presenting the visible world in its fullness and increasingly concerned with what remained “stored in the mind.” For this reason, Yuan painting often shows strong elements of reduction, condensation, and selection. The painter no longer assumes responsibility for transferring nature to paper in its entirety, but instead consciously chooses only the portion most capable of bearing a particular state of mind. A limited scene comes to carry a far more concentrated subjective force.

Following this line of thought, Professor Luo introduced Ni Zan as the most representative figure of this spiritual turn. My immediate impression was that, compared with Fan Kuan, Ni Zan’s landscapes had completely departed from that dense, majestic, and overpowering force, moving instead toward a language of sparseness, distance, and cool detachment. Here Professor Luo especially emphasized that this was by no means a matter of diminished ability. It was a highly self-aware choice. Ni Zan’s most familiar composition is what later came to be summarized as “two banks and one stretch of water”: a nearby slope or riverbank with a few sparse trees, an open expanse of water in the middle ground, and beyond it only the barest suggestion of distant hills and horizon. Real landscapes are of course never so reduced. Yet Ni Zan repeatedly selected precisely this fragment, this corner, this layer of purified emptiness, because for him what deserved to remain was never the whole of nature, but the particular “clear and spacious realm” most capable of accommodating his state of mind.

At this point I became more aware that the change in Yuan painting did not consist simply in painting “less.” Rather, the painter’s judgment about what was worth painting had undergone a fundamental transformation. Professor Luo went on to explain that this is also why Yuan painting is so often described as yi pin, or the category of the “untrammeled.” Song painting was often praised by later generations as shen pin, the “divine” category, because painters had brought their command of natural structure, spatial order, and brush-and-ink expression to an extraordinarily high level. Yuan painting, by contrast, increasingly claimed value through the notion of yi. The word carries the sense of transcendence, but also of wildness, looseness, and a stepping away from established norms. In other words, Yuan painting did not continue by filling in what Song painting had left unfinished. It chose, after the Song had already reached a summit, to take a different path.

Professor Luo used a particularly suggestive phrase to describe this change: Yuan painters were not incapable of painting more fully or more completely; they had chosen to “set it down.” They no longer took upon themselves the task of representing the whole of nature, and instead kept only what they truly needed. In a certain sense, this reflects an artistic logic of “breaking in order to establish.” Once earlier painters had already pushed the representation of objective nature to its height, mere repetition could no longer produce genuine creation. Yuan painters therefore turned to the sparsest imagery in order to express the most truthful traces of the heart-mind—moving from completeness toward incompletion, from richness toward reduction, from grand order toward the inner life of the individual.

In this regard, Ni Zan’s famous line, “With a few sketchy strokes, it is simply to give form to my nature,” may be read as one of the best annotations on the spirit of the age. During the interview I pointed out that the phrase is often quoted, and just as often misunderstood as meaning casualness or painting at whim. Professor Luo explained it with great clarity. The phrase “sketchy strokes” does not mean carelessness, still less perfunctoriness; it refers instead to a high degree of refinement achieved after casting off overly elaborate construction. The phrase “to give form to my nature” makes equally clear that the ultimate object of painting is not the external thing itself, but the artist’s xing—his temperament, character, cultivation, and inner state. This is why Ni Zan’s landscapes are almost entirely free of concrete human activity. What fills the picture is Heaven and Earth, slopes, sparse groves, and stretches of water. He is not trying to narrate worldly life. He is leaving, through the fewest possible elements, a spiritual space that is solitary, cool, elevated, and self-sufficient.

At this stage of the conversation, Professor Luo also stressed the importance of Ni Zan’s intellectual background. In her view, he was deeply shaped by Daoist thought. His family background, way of life, and aesthetic orientation all had very close ties to the Daoist world; one might almost call him “half a Daoist priest.” Understood in this light, the yi in Ni Zan’s painting is more than a matter of stylistic spareness. It reflects an intellectual withdrawal and transcendence: a stepping back from worldly order, a disengagement from utilitarian reality, and the search for a resting place for the spirit within emptiness and stillness. Once seen in this way, the “emptiness” in Ni Zan’s painting no longer suggests paucity. It becomes, on the contrary, a mode of extraordinary spiritual density. Rather than establishing the relation between the human and Heaven-and-Earth through the grand, layered, and spatially rich structures found in Song painting, he simplifies and strips away, allowing landscape to become an echo of the inner state. The less that remains on the surface of the picture, the more the viewer senses an elusive atmosphere of ethereality, drifting, and inward self-possession.

Here I also felt quite strongly that the “emptiness” of Yuan landscape and the “fullness” of Song landscape are not simply opposites. They seem instead to mark a deep internal adjustment within the Chinese painting tradition itself. What the Song established was a stable, solemn, inhabitable cosmic order. By the Yuan, this sense of stability had begun to yield to a more private, inward-turning mode of spiritual expression. Professor Luo further emphasized that this turn was not merely a formal change in taste; it was directly tied to the particular historical condition of the Yuan.

As she explained, the Song was ruled by a Han Chinese dynasty, and the scholar-official class maintained a relatively stable connection with state order. For literati, cultural ideals and political ideals were often deeply intertwined, and Song painting therefore frequently carries a sense of identification with the order of mountains and rivers, along with an awareness of responsibility toward that order. Many Song literati, calligraphers, and scholars familiar to later generations were themselves active within political and institutional life. They did not understand themselves as separate from public order. By the Yuan, however, this situation had changed fundamentally. Under foreign rule and in the reality summed up by the phrase “the nation is broken, yet the mountains and rivers remain,” many literati no longer wished to enter official life. They turned instead toward the position of the recluse, entrusting their emotions and ideals to landscape, poetry, calligraphy, and painting. It was under these historical conditions that painting gradually shifted from being a symbol of public order to becoming a site for the projection of individual character. Literati painting thus moved fully into maturity and reached its high point in the Yuan.

At this point my own understanding also became clearer. If Song landscape painting had grown out of a relatively stable cultural and political structure, Yuan literati painting emerged from disorder, rupture, and withdrawal—and precisely under those pressures, painting was driven toward a more intense spiritual self-awareness. Professor Luo framed it in just these terms. In her view, the flourishing of Yuan literati painting was far more than a purely artistic phenomenon; it was the outcome of the spirit of the age. On the one hand, it arose from historical difficulty, from a spiritual turn taken by literati after the path of politics no longer allowed them to realize their ideals. On the other hand, once they were no longer at the center of power and no longer burdened with direct institutional roles, they were also able to step away from the demands of utilitarian order and devote more of themselves to brush and ink, poetry and prose, and the cultivation of the inner life. In this sense, the maturity of literati painting in the Yuan signals more than a stylistic maturation. It marks the completion of a kind of spiritual self-consciousness.

In connection with the concept of “literati painting,” I pressed Professor Luo further during the interview: why does Chinese painting place such emphasis on the connection between the “literatus” and painting? Why, in the Chinese tradition, are a painter’s learning, character, and art so closely bound together?

Professor Luo’s reply brought to light a very fundamental difference between the Chinese and Western artistic traditions. As she pointed out, Western art history often speaks of the “master,” and embedded in that notion is an emphasis on craft, making, and professional skill. In China, by contrast, the highest-ranking painters and calligraphers are more often described as great masters, a term that does not rest on craftsmanship alone. This is hardly to say that Chinese painting neglects technique. Rather, in the Chinese tradition, technique is never understood as existing in isolation. The excellence of a person’s calligraphy and painting depends not only on training, but also on whether that person’s learning, character, thought, and life experience have reached a certain level. Brush and ink, in the end, are the outward manifestation of cultivated personality, rather than a display of skill alone.

Professor Luo went on to note that the traditional arts of qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting are all closely connected to Daoist thought. They serve first as means of cultivating feeling, giving form to what is in the heart, and settling body and mind. Livelihood and professional expertise are only part of the picture. From this perspective, painting for the literati of premodern China was often less a sacralized profession than a medium for expressing thought, feeling, and an understanding of the world. This also helps explain why Chinese painting has, from early on, remained inseparable from poetry, calligraphy, and colophons. The words written on a painting are never mere decoration; they are an essential part of the work’s meaning. Poetry, calligraphy, and painting together create a complete site of the mind.

Here too I became aware of how sharply this differs from the Western pictorial tradition. Renaissance art in the West certainly valued the humanistic as well, yet many great painters still worked above all through extraordinary technical skill, receiving commissions from aristocrats, the Church, or political authority, and using painting to realize religious narrative, mythological representation, or political symbolism. In Chinese literati painting, by comparison, the driving force comes more directly from within the maker. Its first impulse is not to speak on behalf of an external power, but to give natural form to the painter’s own emotion, thought, and understanding of the world.

Returning, then, to Ni Zan, it becomes easier to see why he occupies such an important place in the history of Chinese painting. In Professor Luo’s view, Ni Zan’s “simplicity” is a purification of thought rather than a reduction of technique; his “emptiness” is a spiritual reserve rather than a visual blank; his yi, likewise, is not a passive flight from reality, but a steadfast defense of personal independence amid the fractures of the age. It is precisely in painters such as Ni Zan that Yuan painting completed its movement from the “representation of nature” toward the “expression of the mind,” and firmly established the core tradition of literati painting: painting is not a copy of the objective world, but a writing of the subject’s spirit.

From my perspective as interviewer, the most important gain from this part of the conversation was a renewed understanding that the term “literati painting” does not simply name a category of painting. It refers to an entire structure of ideas concerning art, character, and the spiritual world. Ni Zan’s significance lies not only in the fact that he created a style of radical simplicity and cool austerity. With the fewest possible strokes, he gave form to the spiritual self-possession of the literati of his age, and in doing so revealed one of the most distinctive inner depths of Chinese painting.