4 ideas
Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, Chinese painting shifted from depicting the outer world to expressing the painter's inner self. Once Northern Song monumental landscape had fully achieved convincing illusion, Yuan scholar-painters living under Mongol rule treated the brush as a vehicle for personal and moral expression rather than description. The pursuit of likeness gave way to painting as a record of the painter's mind.
Yuan painters such as Zhao Mengfu invoked 'fugu', a return to the ancient, and deliberately revived Tang and early archaic styles. Rather than copying, they used earlier models to break away from the polished realism of the recent Southern Song academy. Appealing to an older authority gave them cover to make something formally new.
Su Shi argued that judging a painting by its resemblance to the subject is the view of a child. For him, what mattered was the idea and spirit the scholar-artist conveyed. This literati standard redefined excellence as the expression of cultivated feeling, and it demoted skilled professional realism to mere craft.
Guo Xi set out three ways of viewing a mountain: high distance, looking up from the base toward the peak; deep distance, looking from the front through to the back; and level distance, looking across from a nearby hill toward far mountains. Combining these shifting viewpoints in one scroll lets a landscape be explored by a moving eye rather than seen from one fixed point. The result presents a whole cosmic order instead of a single optical view.