WANG MENG

born 1308, Wu-hsing, Chekiang Province, China died 1385 Pinyin Wang Meng Chinese painter who is placed among the group later known as the Four Masters of the Yan dynasty (1206-1368) although, being in the second generation of that group, he had a more personal style that was less based upon an emulation of ancient masters. Wang Meng was a grandson of another famous Yan dynasty painter, Chao Meng-fu, whose wife (Kuan Tao-sheng, Wang Meng's grandmother) was also a painter. Wang Meng served in a minor capacity in the governments of both the Yan and the Ming but was linked (erroneously, it was later revealed) with a prime minister who conspired against the Ming emperor T'ai-tsu; as a result, he was imprisoned for the last five years of his life. Wang Meng was a close friend of Ni Tsan, whose paintings are typically thin and spare, whereas Wang's are thick and dense with agitated forms and much ink. Like those of Ni Tsan, however, his paintings show less concern than those of his Yan predecessors with deliberate opposition to the pictorially splashy Southern Sung (1127-1279) academic traditions through the conscious exploitation of archaic pictorial means; instead, they place more emphasis upon uniqueness and privacy of vision, an individual attitude encouraged by the revolution brought about in the earlier painting of the Yan dynasty.