Having arrived in Nagasaki in December 1731 and staying until September 1733, the Qing painter Shen Nanpin (1682-ca.1760) stirred up the Japanese artworld that shogunates’ official painters (goyō-eshi) had dominated since the medieval era. By the seventeenth century, Japanese ruling class commissioned the official painters to produce decorative bird-and-flower painting; the elite group’s preference established a firm tradition of the genre. While the tradition was still in practice, the eighteenth century saw a stylistic change with the introduction of Shen’s paintings whose sophisticated use of ink, brushstroke, and colorations would draw profound attention and popularity. The Chinese mode of bird-and-flower painting, which features not only minute brushworks but also auspicious implications, thus emerged as a new trend in Japan. Although often studied as an extension of Chinese literati painting tradition, Japanese nanga (Southern painting) at its inception was deeply associated with the meticulously depicted bird-and-flower painting—arguably the antithesis of literati painting. The unexpected affinity distinguishes the Japanese literati painting from that of China and of Korea. Paying attention to the relationship between nanga and Shen Nanpin’s paintings, this study aims to shed new light on the nanga, or Japanese bunjinga, and its characteristics. While discussing the issue, this paper also argues that it is necessary to focus more on individual painters than on painting schools for a better understanding of the eighteenth-century Japanese painting, the development of which is notorious for its complexities.