Dong Qichang (1555— 1636), a native of Huating, Songjiang (now Maqiao, Minhang District, Shanghai), was a painter and calligrapher in the Ming Dynasty. In the seventeenth year of Wanli, he was a scholar and was awarded editing by the Hanlin Academy. He became an official of Nanjing Ritual Department, and changed his name to "Wen Min" after his death.
Dong Qichang is good at painting mountains and rivers, learning from Dong Yuan, Huang and Ni Zan, and his brushwork is delicate and neutral, quiet and elegant; Clean and bright with ink fragrance, gentle and plain; Green, simple and generous. He is an outstanding representative of Huating School of Painting and has the beauty of "Yan Gu Zhao Zi". His painting and painting theory had a great influence on the painting world in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Calligraphy in and out of the Jin and Tang dynasties, sui generis, can make poetry.
The existing works include Rock House Map, Eight Scenes of Autumn in Dong Qichang in Ming Dynasty, Map of Zhou Jintang, Pipa of Bai Juyi, Poems in Cursive Script, Postscript of Jiang Yan and so on. He is the author of Essays on Painting Zen Rooms, Collected Works of Rong Tai, Notes on Xihongtang (Block Edition) and so on.
Dong Qichang is one of the most influential calligraphers in the history of China's calligraphy. His calligraphy style and calligraphy theory had a certain influence on later generations. Hundreds of years after Zhao Mengfu's charming and mellow Song Xueti dominated the book world, Dong Qichang, with its elegant and elegant style, found a new way of self-reliance, which also led the coquettish for a while, so that "pieces of bamboo are simple and people compete for treasures". This is very important in the art history of China. The theory of "North-South School" put forward by him for China's traditional literati painting had a great influence on later generations and became the main guiding ideology of literati painting creation in the past 300 years.
Although the classification of landscape painting in Dong Qichang's On the Southern and Northern Dynasties provided a philosophical concept for later generations to analyze painting, he advocated that literati painting should be based on Zen, and emphasized the painter's moral cultivation and ideological realm, which had a negative impact on the development of Chinese painting. However, the theory of "southern and northern sects" has also contributed to the sectarian dispute in painting, which has obvious negative effects.