"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.

He seems to have spent quite some time in jail before retreating into Taoism [as did many others of the age—another was the famous painter Ni Zan], completely disillusioned.

There, over a three-year period (1347–50), he completed one of his most famous, and arguably greatest, works, a long hand scroll Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.

[3] In art he rejected the landscape conventions of his era's Academy, but is now regarded as an exemplification of the "literati painters", the wenrenhua ideal.

[1] 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.