Southern School

The Southern School (南宗画, pinyin: nanzhonghua) of Chinese painting, often called "literati painting" (文人画, wenrenhua), is a term used to denote art and artists which stand in opposition to the formal Northern School of painting. The distinction is not geographic, but relates to the style and contents of the works, and to some extent to the position of the artist. Typically, where professional, formal painters were classified as Northern School, scholar-bureaucrats who had either retired from the professional world or who were never a part of it constituted the Southern School.