The religious figure painting in the early Northern Song Dynasty inherited the tradition since the Tang Dynasty, and its creation was still active. Many famous artists participated in the creation and drawing of temple murals, and the mainstream painting style was that of Wu Daozi School. Wu Zongyuan, a representative painter whose works have been handed down to this day, was the first to be promoted. His "Fairy Wars in Yuan Dynasty" has a grand layout, many characters, subtle posture, proper height and density, and a "water shield strip" of clothing lines and dances, showing the characteristics of "five generations being the wind".
By the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, landscape flower-and-bird painting had developed rapidly, once surpassing figure painting. From this time on, figure painting began to evolve in a new direction, from gorgeous heavy coloring to ink painting. Li's Taoist and Buddhist paintings are different from those of his predecessors. They have no primary colors, and they are all drawn with ink lines and brush lines. They not only pay attention to the skills of brushwork, but also are precise and rigorous, full of literati's aesthetic feelings. They are simple, simple, beautiful and have great influence. They experienced the Southern Song Dynasty and arrived in Yuan and Ming Dynasties.
In the late Northern Song Dynasty, a large number of works reflecting urban economic development and urban and rural life appeared, and custom painters who were good at painting chariots and horses houses in Beijing and corner night markets emerged one after another. They deeply described the life of "ordinary people" who are not valued by ordinary "high-minded and elegant people", and their aesthetic vision expanded from depicting immortals, Buddhists and nobles to common customs. Zhang Zeduan's masterpiece The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival is the representative. With its unusually rich content, high historical authenticity and unparalleled artistic expression, it has become an immortal masterpiece in the history of ancient painting in China.
Zen flourished in the Southern Song Dynasty, and Liang Kai was good at drawing simple figures that were easy to practice and relax. Most of them are based on Buddhist Zen figures or literati, and the game is explosive and a few strokes are sketched, which opened the precedent of freehand figure painting in Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. Chang Fa (Mu Xi), a Zen monk painter at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, also created a large number of paintings with Zen as the theme. These paintings were made with scribbled pen and ink, with simple meanings and lofty aspirations. These Zen paintings are wild and rude in spirit, far from the aesthetics of literati, and are evaluated as "sincere and indecent" by mainstream painting circles, but they are favored by Japanese people who believe in Zen. Many Zen paintings in Song and Yuan Dynasties were brought back to Japan by Japanese monks, which had an important influence on Japanese Zen paintings and ink paintings.
During the Southern Song Dynasty, genre paintings and festival paintings reflecting the broad social life became more active. A wide range of subjects, depicting farming, silkworm weaving, vehicle and boat transportation and hawking. Julie, who is good at drawing turning cars, Yan Ciping, who is good at drawing cows, Su Hanchen, who is good at drawing baby plays, and Song Li, who is good at drawing farm vendors, are among the best. These lifelike genre paintings of the Song Dynasty vividly describe the life of the people at the bottom of the society, reflect the appreciation interest of the citizens to a certain extent, and occupy an important position in the development of medieval painting.
In addition to inheriting the warning function of the previous generation, the historical story paintings in the Song Dynasty also draw lessons from the past to illustrate that the most popular themes are praise, loyalty, disloyalty and ethnic contradictions, such as "Wen Xi returned to Han" and "Picking Wei" in the Southern Song Dynasty, aiming at showing loyalty and integrity.
There are also some artists in the Song Dynasty Painting Academy who created and described the deeds of the emperors in the Song Dynasty, such as "Zhongxing Ruiying Tu", which was circulated as Xiao Zhao and mostly praised.