Career
He was the oldest of the "Four Masters of the Yuan Dynasty." (Chinese: 陸堅. Pinyin: Lù Jiān). At the age of 10, the Song fell to the Mongol founders of the Yuan Dynasty and he, like many other Chinese scholars of the time, found his path to officialdom and a good career severely limited. "He was first an unranked ling-shih at a Surveillance Office in the Chiang-che Branch Secretariat (Province), probably engaged in some sort of land tax supervision.
Later he served as a secretary in the metropolitan Censorate where he was unfortunately involved in the slander case of a minister, Chang Lu.
In art he rejected the landscape conventions of his era"s Academy, but is now regarded as one of the great literati painters. Art historian James Cahill identified Huang Gongwang as the artist who "most decisively altered the course of landscape painting, creating models that would have a profound effect on landscapists of later centuries." One of Huang Gongwang’s strongest influences was his technique of using very dry brush strokes together with light ink washes (when colour is applied to a specific area using a soft-haired brush with wide strokes that blend them together into a unified wash) to build up his landscape paintings.
He also wrote a treatise on landscape painting, Secrets of Landscape Painting (寫山水訣, Xiě Shānshuǐ Jué). As was typical for Chinese scholar-officials of his era, he also wrote poetry and had some talent for music