Vigoroosness Secludedness Peacefulness And Illusoriness

Ni Zan is regarded as one of the "Four Great Masters of the Yuan Dynasty", along with Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, and Wang Meng, and the representative of the Chinese drawing style called "Yi Ge". He was characterized as elegant, honest, noble and fastidious. His paintings, usually landscapes, defy many traditional concepts of Chinese painting and are greatly renowned in history. This paper discusses the elements and the style of his paintings in seven chapters. The introduction summarizes and reviews the studies on Ni Zan to date, and elaborates on the purpose and meaning of this study. The first chapter depicts the life story of Ni Zan and the development of his painting style in depth, giving a context of the era that Ni Zan lived in. The second chapter explains the reasons for the style of his landscape paintings from the perspectives of social background, family upraising in arts, and Taoism.The third chapter is the major part of this paper. In this chapter, the author analyzes and comments on the brushwork, ink-monochrome and layout of Ni Zan’s landscape paintings, based on the postscripts of his paintings, comments of critics and detailed reviews on his works. The fourth chapter elaborates on the establishment of Ni Zan’s theory of "Yi Ge" through discussions about the four postscripts of his paintings. The fifth chapter stresses the pragmatic value to study Ni Zan. This chapter is divided into three parts, namely inheritance and innovation, to read a million books and travel a million miles, and personality cultivation. The last chapter concludes the mark Ni Zan left in the painting history and on the later generations.