Page 47 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

keep. The fact that such unorthodox and dissenting artists, some of them former officials,

were supported directly by merchant patrons further attests to the sophistication of at least
one segment of the Yangzhou merchant community.
In contrast to the "wilderness" painters of the late seventeenth century, they rarely
appealed to a high-minded ideal or loyalty. Since state ideology vaunted the perfect success
of the reign, to affirm the gap from mundane realities or simply to refuse to take the

perfection seriously was already a political gesture. The canonical political theme of The
Eight Steeds evoked the military and diplomatic power of the empire, and was a favorite
subject of Castiglione at court. Yet as conceived by a third artist of the Yangzhou group, Jin

Nong (1687-1763), the horses contort themselves into ridiculous positions which parody the
unreal naturalism of the Italian's animals (557). What is more, they seem to be aware of what
they are doing -- there is perhaps a reference here to the other symbolism of horses as loyal
officials -- and obviously do not take themselves seriously. As it happens, Jin, who was not a
trained painter, may not have painted this complex image himself. In what was itself a

parody of contemporary workshop practice, he established a cottage industry of painting with
the help of two or three students who could turn out paintings to his specifications, often in
multiple versions, which he then signed as his own. Another group of paintings from Jin's

"workshop" consists of reconstructions of antique paintings that he had once owned or seen,
but were now in the hands of some rich or powerful person -- sometimes the Emperor is
mentioned -- and so were inaccessible. The group constitutes an imaginary painting
collection, the poor artist's answer to, and satire of, Qianlong's unprecedented concentration
of early masterpieces.

The youngest of the Yangzhou artists, Luo Ping (1733-99), extended this dissenting
tradition into the late eighteenth century, most of which he spent in Beijing. Luo was a
graduate of Jin Nong's painting workshop; he was as versatile a painter as Jin was limited,

one reason for thinking that he may be responsible for some paintings that bear Jin Nong's
signature. A deeply religious man, he claimed to be able to see ghosts. A handscroll of
sketches recording his observations was one of the most famous paintings of the time,
attracting poems and other commentaries from leading intellectuals of the day over a period
of forty years, most of them appended to the scroll itself. The handscroll version reproduced

here was painted at the end of his life for an admirer of the original scroll (560). There were
many reasons for the popularity of his ghost paintings: although the images had a precedent
in the details of Buddhist Water and Land Assembly paintings, they were still astonishingly

original; ghost stories were in fashion; and some saw in the images a veiled critique of the
powerful. But their deepest appeal, along with other paintings by him of dreams and the
vanished past, may have lain in Luo Ping's displacement of reality to a space outside