Literati painting — wenrenhua in Chinese, the painting of the scholar-gentleman class — is less a style in the formal sense than an attitude toward painting, a set of values and priorities that the educated elite of imperial China developed in conscious opposition to the professional painting establishments of the imperial court, insisting that the purpose of painting was not the skilled depiction of external appearances but the expression of the painter's inner character, moral cultivation, and learning, and that a painting revealing these qualities through apparently simple, even clumsy brushwork was immeasurably superior to the most technically accomplished work produced by a professional painter in service of commercial or official ends. The theoretical foundations of the literati painting tradition were laid by the great Song dynasty polymath Su Shi in the eleventh century, who argued that the highest painting was continuous with poetry and calligraphy — all three being modes through which the cultivated mind expressed itself through the controlled movement of a brush — and that the true subject of any painting was ultimately the character of the man who made it, the visible record of his learning, his sensibility, and his moral seriousness preserved in every mark. The tradition reached its fullest practical realization during the Yuan dynasty, when the Mongol conquest of China left many Chinese scholar-officials unwilling to serve the new rulers and therefore with both the leisure and the psychological motivation to pour their energies into painting — producing in figures like Ni Zan, whose landscapes of almost ascetic emptiness remain the purest expression of literati values ever achieved, and Huang Gongwang, whose Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains scroll is considered the summit of the entire tradition, works of such refinement and depth that they continue to define the ideals of Chinese painting culture to the present day.