Ink plum (momei) has been one of the most admired and widely practised genres of ink painting in China, Japan and Korea 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, catalysed one another to produce the birth of a new painting genre and its codification. 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.