This book examines the work of one of the most famous Chinese artists of all time. In this study, the first full-length work on Shitao in a Western language, Jonathan Hay provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis of this artist by undertaking a social history of his achievement. By focusing on different social, political, biographical, economic, religious and aesthetic issues, the author reveals the full complexity of Shitao's practice. Throughout this study, Hay also argues for the modernity of Shitao's painting, showing how his work is embedded in the socioeconomic context of the seventeenth century and how it involves a redefinition of subjectivity in terms of self-consciousness, doubt, and an aspiration to autonomy.