Beijing

Ni Zan was born into a family of scholars that belonged to a wealthy elite. He lived towards the end of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty during the death the infamous emperor Kublai-Han. He one of the four great masters of the Yuan Dynasty, the other three being Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen and Wang Mang. His landscapes are so unique and so immediately recognizable that it is practically impossible to confuse his art with any other painter in China. Ni Zan’s landscapes are considered to belong to what the Chinese call the “Yi Pin” category of art. This category, the highest of four, is the exclusive realm of very few artists in Chinese history. There are many different opinions on who really belongs to this prestigious rank of artistic merit and many critiques suggested different artist for varying reasons but Ni Zan stands out as a consensus which makes his position as an artistic genius undisputable.

Ni Zan landscapes truly bring out the great importance of brush work in Chinese landscape painting, especially that of the Literati tradition. His Minimalism turns every single brush stroke into an emotional statement that can’t be ignored. The almost compulsive repetition of theme throughout his career has never led his art to lose its originality and emotional vigor. His world is the pure world of solitude where nature reflects man’s innermost psychology but at the same time eliminates human figures from the landscape. This gave his art the unique quality of dealing with human nature through the medium of Mother Nature without the need to involve humans at all. The special aura and atmosphere of Ni Zan’s paintings originate in his representative composition of widely separated riverbanks rendered in sketch brushwork and foreground trees silhouetted against the expanse of water. As mentioned these sparse landscapes never represent people and therefore went against traditional conventions of Chinese painting. The near intimate foreground is balanced by a blurry and distant horizon which ends at the top end of the paper. This simple composition can be seen in Ni Zan’s masterpiece “The Six Gentlemen”( see top left image). In this painting we see six trees which are the painting’s focal point, they stretch from the foreground to occupy the Arian part of the painting’s center, acting as a type of mechanism which connects the foreground and background giving the work a strong sense of balance. One of the greatest qualities of Ni Zan’s landscape paintings is that in spite of the balance and organic feeling they display, they still manage to evoke strong feelings of melancholy, mystery and detachment in the viewer. This barren and empty world is a sphere of contemplation and spiritual space where the haughty Chinese scholar finds refuge for his seeking sole. This enigmatic and captivating world is executed in shallow shades of gray where pure dark ink is scattered frugally as highlights across the painting surface. The dry brush strokes which delicately compose the texture of the slim vulnerable but yet resilient trees and the ground are done with a careless facility that won Ni Zan his status as an artist that reaches supreme expression not through hard work and time consuming technique but with the type of ease and naturalness that only the greatest artists posses.

Like all the four masters of the Yuan Dynasty, Ni Zan’s brush technique originates from Chinese Calligraphy. This type of art is primarily concerned with expressing emotion through brush work. This led many artists to create paintings that display different variations of their “trade mark” brush patterns - a kind of artistic signature which is embedded in the painting in different and repetitive variations. Huang Gongwang is a classic example of this type of virtuosity where a landscape reveals the identity of the painter through endless patterns and representative brush technique. Ni Zan however, preferred not to indulge in such technique which usually required abundance of visual data. Instead he executes his landscapes with great subtlety and self control, his ability to remain simple and at the same time inspire the viewer has won him the reputation of one of China's greatest landscape painters.

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