4 ideas
Xie He ranks six criteria for judging a painting, with 'spirit resonance, life-motion' (qiyun shengdong) placed first and technical matters (brushwork, likeness, color, composition, copying of models) ranked below it. The ordering is the point: a work that is anatomically correct but lacks animating vitality fails, while one that has vitality can be forgiven technical lapses.
Chinese painting derives its line, rhythm, and standards of judgment from calligraphy, so a painted bamboo or rock is read the way a written stroke is read, as a trace of the moving hand and the character behind it. Mastery of the brush in writing therefore comes before, and grounds, pictorial skill; line is valued as rhythmic gesture rather than as a contour enclosing form.
The Song literati moved the value of a painting from what it depicts to who painted it: brushwork is taken as a direct reading of the artist's cultivation, temperament, and moral quality. Under this lens the amateur scholar-gentleman who paints for self-expression outranks the skilled professional who paints to order, because craft without inner refinement produces a merely competent surface.
Shitao argues that all painting begins from one primordial stroke, which is the painter's own direct grasp of the underlying order of nature. Once the painter commands that stroke, rules and inherited methods become servants rather than masters. He rejects slavish imitation of old masters, arguing that the ancients made their own method and the painter must likewise establish 'the method of no method.'