Rongxi Studio, 1372

容膝斋图, Rongxi Studio, is dated 1372 — two years before Ni Zan's death — and now hangs in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Its title names a room barely large enough to hold one's knees, 容膝, a phrase borrowed from Tao Yuanming's rhapsody on returning home, where contentment is measured by how little space it needs. The painting announces its subject before you've read a single stroke of it.

The composition is his familiar three-part device. In the near ground, a spare stand of six or seven trees and a single open pavilion, empty of any sitter, drawn in dry, broken outlines that barely commit to the paper. Above them, an uninked band the width of a hand — the lake — doing all its work by staying blank. Beyond that, low pale hills, ink so thin it is barely darker than the silk under it.

Nothing here asks to be admired for its labour. The whole sheet could be redrawn in an afternoon, and that is close to the point: this is a painter deep into the last two decades of a wandering life, still drawing the same six trees and the same empty water, because by then that was the whole of what he wanted to say. Ni Zan first gave the painting to his friend Boxuan, 檗軒, who held it two years before passing it on to a physician friend of theirs, Renzhong, 仁仲. Only then did Ni Zan add the long colophon inscribed above the scene, in the plain, unhurried hand of someone who has stopped trying to impress anyone — the poem Renzhong had asked for, naming the room the painting is now known by.