Author(s)

Qingjun He

Corresponding Author

Qingjun He

Abstract

As the founder of Southern School Painting, Yuan Dong did not produce much influence in the Five Dynasties and the early Northern Song Dynasty. However, in the middle and late periods of the Northern Song Dynasty, Dong was “discovered” by Kuo Shen for the first time, and then became the orthodoxy of Southern School literati painting in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. His image went through a historical process of continuous superimposition and construction. Kuo Shen’s “Yuan Dong” represents the aesthetic paradigm corresponding to the development of Neo-Confucianism in Song Dynasty. The “impressionist” painting style and “real mountains in Jiangnan” depicted in pictures become the source of the later “Southern School” literati painting system.

Keywords

Yuan Dong; the Jiangnan painting; freehand brushwork; cultivation of moral character; natural principles