Emperor Huizong of Song, a skilled poet, painter, calligrapher, and musician, who gains renown for his painstakingly rendered bird-and-flower paintings and for his so-called slender-gold calligraphy style.

An avid collector whose patronage extends to music, poetry, and the minor arts, Huizong acquires more than sixty-three hundred paintings for the imperial gallery and presides over a new imperial academy of outstanding painting.

Chinese prodigy Wang Ximeng, one of the most renowned court painters of the Northern Song period, had been taught personally by Emperor Huizong himself.

His only surviving work is a thirty-nine foot-long scroll titled A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains.

The painting, finished by Wang when he was only eighteen (he dies at twenty-three), is one of the largest in Chinese history, and has been described as one of the greatest works of Chinese art.

The highly influential court painter Li Tang, a pivotal figure in the transition from the monumentally scaled landscape tradition of the Northern Song period to the more intimate mode of the succeeding Southern Song period, is renowned for his so-called ax-cut brushstroke, which he employs to finely depict sharply faceted rock surfaces, as in his celebrated scroll painting “Whispering Pines in the Mountains.”Zhang Zeduan is another court painter of the Northern Song Dynasty: in the aftermath of the dynasty's fall, his paintings often convey criticisms of the contemporary social circumstances.

Zhang’s most famous painting is Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a wide handscroll that depicts life in a city.

It reveals much about life in China during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Its myriad depictions of different people interacting with one another reveals the nuances of class structure and the many hardships of urban life as well.

It also displays accurate depictions of technological practices found in Song China.

The original painting is celebrated as the most famed work of art from the Song Dynasty, and will be a pride of the personal imperial collections of emperors for centuries.

It will inspire several works of art that revive and update the style of the original.

Song dynasty artists, often working in wood, carve sophisticated images of the Bodhisattva Kuanyin seated in the Maharajalila position, or “Repose of the Great King.” Such wood-sculpted figures are usually gessoed before being painted.The seated wooden statue of Dainichi Nyorai at the Shingon temple of Enjō-ji in Nara, which has been designated a National Treasure, is the earliest and best-substantiated work by Japanese master sculptor Unkei Unkei's next documented works, commissioned by military leaders prominent in the ensuing Kamakura shogunate, for temples in eastern Japan, will be are physically more massive and powerful, as will be his giant Niō at Tōdai-ji.

By contrast, in this early work Unkei employs a more "gentle" or "tranquil" style.

The Nara school’s new style blends the naturalistic vigor derived from Nara-period antecedents with a humanistic realism, as exemplified in Unkei’s “Nio,” one of the enormous wooden guardian figures posted at the Great South Gate of the Todaiji.

The highly influential Chan Buddhist monk-painter Liang Kai develops a more subjective and intuitive approach to painting than that of the contemporary academic school.

Liang executes a celebrated monochrome ink painting, the “Huineng Chopping Bamboo,” in the “qianbi” or abbreviated style.