Guo Zhongshu, courtesy name Shuxian, was a Chinese painter, scholar, calligrapher and philologist during the Five Dynasties period and Song dynasty. He was noted for his paintings of landscapes and structures.

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period was an era of political upheaval and division in Imperial China from 907 to 979. Five dynastic states quickly succeeded one another in the Central Plain, and more than a dozen concurrent dynastic states, collectively known as the Ten Kingdoms, were established elsewhere, mainly in South China. It was a prolonged period of multiple political divisions in Chinese imperial history.