Page 55 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

compositions discussed earlier, but in export studies of flowers, plants and insects. With an

almost botanical precision that brought new colors into Chinese painting, the two brothers
pursued an unsentimental naturalism (576). Flowers, often drawn from outside the canonical
range, are shown broken, blown into disarray, while cut-off compositions suggest a scene
suddenly glimpsed. This move in the direction of a new immediacy had a different
expression in the new fashion in Hong Kong and Guangzhou from the mid-nineteenth

century onwards for photographic portraits, among the very compradore elite who were
customers of the Ju brothers. From other nineteenth-century photographs we can see that the
changes extended into the urban environment, which in Guangzhou included many Western

buildings.
Shanghai, too, had many portrait photographers from the 1870s onwards, and many
more Western buildings than Guangzhou. It also had, after 1884, a weekly picture magazine,
Dianshi zhai huabao, produced by the photolithographic technique. Through its thousands of
images a Chinese public hungry for information and fantasy was introduced to Western

civilization, and was offered unexpected visions of its own (574). The awkward but lively
visual language of these illustrations owes an obvious debt to the export paintings which
China had been sending West since the late eighteenth century. Now, however, their

conventions were being incorporated into a burgeoning industry of photolithographic
illustration for magazines and books to become fully part of China's own visual culture.
Shanghai also had a vast market for decorative paintings, functional in much the same
way as the larger works by Su Liupeng and the Ju brothers in Guangzhou or, at an earlier
date, those of Hua Yan and Li Shan in Yangzhou. Of the painters who flocked to Shanghai to

serve that market, one in particular stands out. Ren Yi (1840-1896) came from the same
Zhejiang town of Shaoxing as Ren Xiong, to whom he was probably very distantly related.
The son of a local rice merchant and sometime portrait painter, he was eventually

apprenticed to Ren Xiong's brother, Ren Xun, who brought him to Suzhou. Within a few
years he had left for Shanghai, where he quickly made an impact, painting decorative works
in the mannered Chen Hongshou style associated with his native Shaoxing and with the Ren
brothers. By this time, however, other painters were developing a more dynamic style, more
specific to Shanghai, which combined odd but vivid viewpoints with spontaneous execution.

Ren Yi, inspired by the work of Bada shanren, transformed this into the means to a visually
exciting and psychologically ambiguous vision, evoking a lovely but harsh world where one
had to be constantly on one's guard (577). While these sophisticated decorative works always

remained the basis of his commercial success, Ren Yi was also the outstanding portraitist of
the nineteenth century. Several of his surviving portraits depict his friend and student in
painting, Wu Changshi, who would eventually develop Zhao Zhiqian's heritage in a more