This new lyrical style, which predominated in the last century of the Sung painting academy, was primarily the creation of two artists, Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190-1224) and Hsia Kuei (active ca. 1180-1230), whose works were to become the models for Ashikaga Zen landscapes. They both experimented with asymmetry and the deliberate juxtaposition of traditional landscape elements. Space became an element in its own right, particularly in the works of Ma Yuan, whose "one-corner" compositions were often virtually blank save for a bottom corner. An eclectic stylist, he frequently depicted the foreground in the ax-cut brushstrokes and sharp diagonals of the North, while distant mountains in the same painting were treated by the soft, graded washes of the South. Hsia Kuei did much the same, except that he took a marked interest in line and often painted foreground trees and rocks in sharp silhouette. In later years, after the Ming dynasty came to power, Chinese tastes reverted to a preference for the Northern style, but in Japan the so-called Ma-Hsia lyric school was revered and copied by Zen artists who found the subjective treatment of nature a perfect expression of Zen doctrines concerning intuitive insight. The Southern Sung academy did not deliberately produce Ch'an art; it was the Japanese who identified the Ma-Hsia style explicitly with Zen. However, during the early years of the thirteenth century, an expressionist, Ch'an school of art-- the heir of the earlier T'ang eccentrics--arose and produced a spontaneous style of painting as unpredictable as Zen itself. The center for this protest school of landscape art was not the Sung academy but rather a Ch'an monastery near Hangchow, and its leader was a monk named Mu-ch'i (ca. 1210-ca. 1280), who painted all subjects--landscapes, Ch'an _koan_, and expressionistic still-lifes--with brushstrokes at once skillfully controlled and deceptively casual. His was a disciplined spontaneity. A master of technique, he deliberately disregarded all the conventions. As time passed, various staid painters of the Sung academy heard his siren call of ecstasy and abandoned their formal styles, ending their days drinking with the Ch'an monks in monasteries around Hangchow, lost in the sheer exhilaration of ink and brush. When Japanese monks began traveling to China, their first encounter with landscape painting was in these monasteries. Consequently, the styles and the paintings of the Ch'an Mu-ch'i school were the first to be sent to Japan. In later years, after the Northern school of painting was again in vogue in China, Ming Chinese were only too happy to unload outdated Southern Sung monochromes on the eager Japanese. The emissaries of Yoshimitsu (as well as earlier traveling monks) had their pick of these works, with the result that the very best examples of the spontaneous Mu-ch'i and the lyric Ma-Hsia styles of Sung painting are today in Japan.