Northern Song landscape painting different from Southern Song painting because of its paradigm shift in representation. If Southern Song period landscape painting is said to be looking inward, Northern Song painting is reaching outward. During the Northern Song period, the rulers’ goal is to consolidate and extend the elites value across the society. Whereas Southern Song painters decided to focus on personal expression. Northern Song landscapes are regarded as “real landscape”, since the court appreciated the representation relationship between art and the external world, rather than the relationship between art and the artists inner voice. The painting, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is horizontally displayed and there are four mountain ranges arranged from left to right. Similar to another early Southern Song painter, Zhou Boju, both artists glorified their patrons by presenting the gigantic empire images in blue and green landscape painting. The only difference is that in Zhou's painting, there are five mountain ranges arranged from right to left. The scenes in the Southern Song paintings are about north landscape that echo the memory of their lost north territory. However, ironically, some scholars suggested that Wang Ximeng's A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains depicts the scenes of the south not the north.
