The Rongxi Studio

A few spare trees stand on a near bank, an empty pavilion among them, with a stretch of blank water and low hills beyond - and not a single human figure anywhere. Ni Zan, a wealthy aesthete of the late Yuan who gave away his estate and drifted the rivers by houseboat, made this austere emptiness his signature, working in pale, dry ink with a famously sparing hand. Later critics prized exactly this 'blandness,' a deliberate plainness held to be the hardest thing in painting to achieve. The bare pavilion became a model copied by scholar-painters for centuries after.