Ink plum (momei) has been one of the most admired and widely practiced genres of ink painting in East Asia throughout the last six hundred years. In this study, the first full account of momei, Maggie Bickford provides a comprehensive account of genre formation in Chinese painting.

Fully interdisciplinary in approach, it demonstrates how art historical, literary, cultural, and political situations, groups, and individuals acted upon one another to produce the birth of a new painting genre and its codification. The emergence of ink plum in the Song Dynasty, at the beginning of the twelfth century, and its codification under alien Mongol rule in the mid-fourteenth, can be documented precisely, allowing the modern scholar to observe at close range the formative processes of Chinese scholar-art.

Moreover, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre examines critically the transformation of the alternative art of the Song scholar elite into the self-proclaimed orthodoxy of later Chinese painting.