Chinese painting of the Song (Jp: Sō 宋) and Yuan (Jp: Gen 元) dynasties, particularly as collected in Japan. The majority of Japanese sōgenga were brought to Japan by Zen monks who had studied in China, although some paintings were gifts from Chinese officials and others were imported by merchants. In Japan, the Chinese paintings were sometimes given new contexts that necessitated altering their format or size. For instance, hand scrolls were severely cropped and mounted as hanging scrolls to fit the *tokonoma 床の間 of tea rooms.
Japanese collectors appreciated a wide variety of painting subjects, including landscape, bird-and-flower, and Taoist and Zen figures (see *dōshakuga 道釈画). This last category, much disdained by later Chinese critics, survives almost exclusively in Japan, where Muqi (Jp: Mokkei 牧谿, late 13th century), Liang Kai (Jp: Ryō Kai 梁楷, act. early 13th century) and other painters are revered. Catalogues of shogunal and temple collections reveal the tremendous value accorded Song and Yuan paintings as symbols of Chinese culture and, later, as symbols for the conservative Tokugawa 徳川 shoguns and daimyō 大名 of their heirship to the prestige of the Ashikaga 足利.
Many of the paintings now preserved in Japan were produced in the coastal province of Zhekiang (Jp: Sekkō 浙江), the center of Chinese trade with Japan and the location of several large Zen temples, and especially at the port city of Ningbo (Jp: Neiha 寧波) whose artists produced both religious and secular painting, mainly in the Southern Song court style *intaiga 院体画.
Song and Yuan paintings influenced Japanese Buddhist painting and monochrome painting of secular and Zen themes. Sōgenga introduced new modes of painting to Japan (such as *haboku 破墨 and *mōryōga 魍魎画) as well as new subjects (such as *Shōshō hakkei 瀟湘八景). The wide influence of sōgenga is thus seen in much of Muromachi painting, and many aspects of art after the early 16th century also bear the imprint of what was known as "early" Chinese painting.