If "beauty lies between likeness and dissimilarity" is the conscious pursuit of painters, then Zhang has firmly sought his own artistic path through his own pen and ink-realizing his desire to interpret the West with his own exploration. The western region is a multi-ethnic region, and its unique customs, culture and economic state make it maintain an original and orderly lifestyle. The relationship between man and nature here is harmonious and rich, which can be expressed from many angles. The western landscape represented by Zhang is not the discovery of regional concept, the masculine beauty in form, nor the opportunistic road to fame, but the exploration and development in inheritance. Zhang Yishan writes about people, replacing mountains with people, writing about its grandeur, solemnity and simplicity, writing about its introverted rhythm and vitality, but not deliberately expressing desolation, bitterness and indifference. With the change and deduction of different pen and ink techniques, Zhang put light ink, thick ink, broken ink, accumulated ink and Jiao Mo in their proper positions with different brushwork, pen type and pen sense, striving to achieve the goal of "using one color of ink to make all colors work", and creating a vast and seamless effect in repeated overlapping, repetition and wiping rendering.
When some painters described all this with novelty and bystander attitude, Zhang entered the western culture and life earlier. In recent years, his footprints have been persistently wandering in this thick land in the northwest. He devoted himself to the study of Buddhist culture and national customs and devoted himself wholeheartedly to a cultural atmosphere he needed.
Zhang's landscape paintings are transformed into metaphysical "mental images" as far as possible because of their emphasis on verve and freedom from the relationship of the material world, thus achieving artistic effects of similarity but dissimilarity, combination of form and spirit, fluency and fun. Zhang's brushwork is methodical, complex but not chaotic, dense and lush, extremely vivid and full of charm. His dry and wet interlaced and complementary brushwork methods have produced a sense of massiness, plainness, vastness and boldness in the superposition of layers. "Until the ebb tide, the river bank widens, and there is no wind blowing my lonely sail." Zhang's western landscape painting embodies its soul, observes its magnificence, writes its vigor and fluency, and perfects its pursuit in practice. The communication between the painter's soul and nature is the lifeline of artistic creation. It is precisely because of Zhang's familiarity with the yellow land in the northwest and his constant reluctance to the northwest that artistic inspiration and creative passion will erupt. Some critics think: "Zhang read the painting, living the west."