Chinese landscape painting, called shanshui or mountain-water painting, is the tradition of rendering peaks, rivers, mist and pines in ink and brush on silk or paper. It became the leading and most respected genre in the tenth and eleventh centuries, under masters such as Li Cheng, Fan Kuan and Guo Xi. It often valued an expressive or cultivated vision over optical likeness, though many works depict identifiable places. Shaped by Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian ideas about the natural order, it set out to show how the world is arranged and where a human being stands inside it. It remains a living practice across East Asia.
Look at the most famous mountain in Chinese painting and you will almost miss the people. Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams, made around the year 1000, gives most of its tall silk to a wall of rock and falling water. Down in one corner a man drives a train of pack mules along a track, so small that the trees nearly swallow them. For more than nine centuries no one could prove whose hand had made the picture. Then in 1958 a curator at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Li Lincan, worked across the surface with a magnifying glass and found two characters tucked into the leaves just behind the mule train: the painter's name. Fan Kuan had signed himself into the undergrowth, at exactly the scale he had granted his travelers.