Page 56 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

dynamic direction on the basis of what he learned from Ren (575). The portrait reproduced

here, A Miserable and Shabby Official, dates from 1888, when Wu was briefly serving in
local government, and had to wear full regalia even in the heat of the summer. The implied
groundplane, and the figure's distance from the viewer, one notes, are those of portrait
photography of the time. Another portrait painted in 1886 bore the equally sardonic title
Hungry and Looking to Heaven, in return for which Wu, then a leading seal-carver,

presented Ren Yi with a seal reading "slave of painting" (574). The complicity between the
two men is that of two members of Shanghai's heteregenous middle class, a highly politicized
social world in which reformist and even Republican ideas were prevalent. Ren Bonian

himself became an activist through paintings which show rebellions being plotted, evoke the
world of secret societies, and commemorate the the Ming dynasty which the secret societies
aimed to restore. It would take another generation for an explicitly Republican painting to
develop, but Ren Yi's art already anticipates the 1911 Revolution which brought to an end,
not only the dynasty of the Manchus, but the imperial dynastic system itself.