Unconventional Landscapes

Unconventional Landscapes explores the bizarre and fantastical landscape paintings of Wu Bin, a professional painter of the Late Ming dynasty. This thesis attempts to show that Wu Bin expressed his originality by combining exaggerated and distorted stylistic elements from past masters with a syncretism of religious iconography. The revival of Northern Song monumental landscape painting and the Late Ming discourse on originality and strangeness (qi), which may have influenced Wu Bin, is also investigated.