This dissertation addresses modern Chinese ink painters' use of seventeenth-century yimin art as a philosophical, aesthetic, and political vehicle for synchronizing the fundamental values of Chinese art with the modern world during the first half of the twentieth century. In this case, the polemical term “ yimin” designates “leftover subjects” or loyalists to a previous fallen dynasty. “Ming yimin art” refers to the ink paintings done by a group of seventeenth-century individualist masters—among whom the most famous is Shitao (1642-1707)—whose paintings often appear expressive or abstract from a modern perspective. The rediscovery of this individualist art in a modern context was carried out almost simultaneously in China and Japan, and later spread to Europe and America. Employing a body of still understudied materials from art journals, museum archives, and artists' writings to paintings, my study challenges the common misconception that early twentieth-century Chinese ink painters were conservative and their paintings outdated. I argue modern ink painters re-appropriated and canonized seventeenth-century individualist painting with a dual purpose not only to legitimize and prioritize the value of traditional ink aesthetics within an international art scene, but also to create an ink painting suitable to a new forward-looking Chinese culture. The rediscovery and reformulation of Ming yimin painting by twentieth-century intellectuals can best be understood as a process of temporal and spatial “alignment” or “synchronization” as modern ink painters sought to situate themselves both within China's historical continuum and within an international scene increasingly aware of cross-cultural comparison and market competition. This bipartite act of synchronizing the past and present, the traditional/Chinese and modern/Western, enabled early Qing individualist painting to be reinterpreted as an art of modern value and transformed into something new by both Chinese and Western standards. The simultaneous impulses to historicize and renew are both responses to the exigencies of Chinese modernity. Well-exposed to the notions of Social-Darwinism and constantly reminded of the undeniable success of Western powers, early twentieth-century Chinese painters strategized to find an artistic heritage in China's past that could be compared, no matter how vaguely, to certain aspects of modern Western art. Concurrent with, and partially inspired by, contemporaneous Japanese interest in seventeenth-century individualist art, many late Qing and Republican ink artists readopted and reevaluated yimin painting in order to transform their medium into an art they considered distinctively modern. Their promotion of yimin art and theory as parallel to contemporary European art was aided by the modern means of printing and publishing. Reflecting the drastically changing ideological concerns of Chinese intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, the appropriation of yimin art and the reinvigoration of ink traditions were carried out in a variety of fashions by different generations of historians and painters.