The greatest contribution of Guan Daosheng to the genre of bamboo painting was her tendency to paint it as part of a landscape, as opposed to isolated branches that were pressed close to the picture plane. As seen in "Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain", attributed to Guan, the bamboo itself is painted as part of the thickets in which it naturally grows, and it is seen as subject to the effects of the landscape and atmosphere in which it is located. This style followed the tradition of an artist of the early Yuan whose name goes unrecorded in China but who is called Tan Zhirui in Japan, where his paintings were brought by Chan Buddhist monks. The ink tonality does not vary much in these works by Guan, as the entirety of the subject matter is affected by the misty atmosphere in which it is portrayed.