Ni Zan was fastidious about cleanliness. As reflected in his paintings, he strived for lightness, sparseness and elegance and would not waste even one stroke and ink “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. Controversially he said In 1364, he said
“I use bamboo painting to write out the exhilaration in my breast, that is all. Why should I worry whether it shows likeness or not?”
This being a bold statement to prior masters as most “true” chinese painters felt that nature was perfect so it must be depicted as so within the painting. His desire to use expression within his paintings deflected a lot of general rules and formulas previous maters had used. He was born into a wealthy family in Wuxi. His style name was Yuan Zhen (元鎮). He was born after the death of the Kublai Khan, the Mongolian ruler who defeated the Song and established dominance over all that had traditionally been considered China. The Yuan rulers did not trust many of the Confucian scholars and instead preferred to instill Mongolians and Muslims to perform administrative tasks which gave him a social disadvantage from the beginning. 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 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...