Page 53 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

Zhao came from the city of Shaoxing on the northern coast of Zhejiang, the very part

of the country that had gained most in commercial terms from the encroachments of foreign
powers. From this area came the bankers and the English-speaking compradores of Shanghai
who acted as middlemen between Western merchants and their Chinese suppliers and buyers.
Zhao provided the model for other northern Zhejiang artists such as Pu Hua (1834-1911) and
Wu Changshi (1844-1927), active in Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, and popular with Zhejiang businessmen there. Through these artists, the new
language he created became central to modern Chinese painting.
Modernity Embraced. The initiatives just discussed came from within traditional elite

culture, and demonstrate greater powers of resistance and adaptation than it is often given
credit for. Nonetheless, the most active artistic response to changing times came out of a very
different world located along China's southern and eastern coast and in the treaty port cities.
Aggressive commercialization, popular culture and progressive politics created an
unprecedented cultural mix which found its most vital expressions in painting and

illustration.
The earliest signs of a modern visual culture in the making appeared in Guangzhou.
Su Liupeng (c.1796-1862) not only came from a relatively poor background, but seems to

have been largely self-taught as a painter. He probably moved to Guangzhou in the 1830s,
after he had achieved a certain level and reputation in his home area near the Luofu
Mountains. Many of his paintings depict historical, theatrical, religious or literary stories and
figures that had popular currency and so were easily recognized. Other paintings told their
own story: they were observations of village and urban life, rather like lyrical cartoons. This

range of subjects is anticipated in the work of two eighteenth century Fujianese artists,
Shangguan Zhou (1665-ca.1750) and his more famous follower, Huang Shen (1687-1772).
Given the traditional cultural and economic connections between the adjoining provinces of

Guangdong and Fujian, it seems likely that Su Liupeng was working from a regional
tradition. His style was also distinctively regional. The brushwork displays the deliberate
coarseness and delight in blotched, scribbled and smeared effects that were found all along
the Guangdong and Fujian coasts and in Taiwan during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. This can in turn be traced back to the work of Zhe school painters from the region,

a Ming connection which has parallels in the political realm. It was in Guangdong that the
Taiping Rebellion began, drawing upon a submerged popular tradition of hostility toward the
Manchus dating back to the Ming resistance of the late seventeenth century. Although there

is no evidence that Su Liupeng was involved in the Rebellion, his paintings address similar
issues, representing the disenfranchised without any hint of condescension. On the contrary:
on a painting of blind men in a fight, he writes; "These two blind men are not able to see each