The Smithsonian Institution Regents of the University of Michigan Ren Xiong and His Self-Portrait Author(s): James Cahill Source: Ars Orientalis, Vol. 25, Chinese Painting (1995), pp. 119-132 Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629491 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 14:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Smithsonian Institution and Regents of the University of Michigan are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ars Orientalis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.182 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 14:14:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
The Smithsonian InstitutionRegents of the University of Michigan
Ren Xiong and His Self-PortraitAuthor(s): James CahillSource: Ars Orientalis, Vol. 25, Chinese Painting (1995), pp. 119-132Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the Historyof Art, University of MichiganStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629491 .
Accessed: 14/06/2014 14:14
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The Smithsonian Institution and Regents of the University of Michigan are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Ars Orientalis.
http://www.jstor.org
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within the history of Chinese painting, it is diffi- cult to avoid seeing it as a period that produced few masterpieces and not many major masters. ' Three painters are generally recognized, in Chi- nese andJapanese writings more than in Western, as meriting positions in the first rank: Zhao Zhi- qian S (1829-84), Xugu T r (1823-96), and Ren Yi fi or Ren Bonian {f fb * (1840- 95). (Landscapists such as Dai Xi , E,, 1801-60, famous though they may have been in their time, are ultimately of small consequence, since they add littie to the long-established formulae of Ortho- dox school landscape.) To these three should be added, in spite of his short life and relatively small output, Ren Xiong f? IR or Ren Weichang {i 'E A (1823-57); and, to the short list of masterpieces, his self-portrait (fig. 1). One of the truly arresting works in later Chinese painting, it confronts us with complex questions while appearing to offer, in both image and inscription, the most straight- forward kind of self-revelation. In this it is like the 1638 self-portrait of Chen Hongshou n m (fig. 5), which I have written about before and will touch on again later in this essay. 2
Four earlier studies of Ren Xiong's self-por- trait have been made, one of them unpublished: the late Zhang Anzhi's"; T t article of 1979;3 a seminar paper written by a former student of mine, Jane Debevoise, in 1982; 4 Richard Vino- grad's, in his book on later Chinese portraiture; and Howard Rogers's entry for this painting in an exhibition catalogue.6 The fact that the last three of these are by former students of mine as- suages somewhat the difficulty they raise when I attempt still another study; at least it is kept, so to speak, in the family. The studies by Vinograd and Rogers became available to me just as I was begin- ning work on this paper7 and nearly drove me to change my topic by saying most of what seem to me the right things about the painting. I will try, nevertheless, to supplement their excellent treat- ments by finding still other ways to look at it.
Biography
Biographical studies of Ren Xiong in Chinese have been published by Zhang Anzhi, in his 1979
article on the self-portrait, and by Gong Yanxing I ), X, in a 1981 article that introduced infor- mation from newly discovered sources. I The only substantial biography in English (apart from two that are unpublished, Jane Debevoise's in her seminar paper and Stella Lee's in her doctoral dissertation on Ren Bonian) 9 is in Howard Rog- ers's catalogue entry. ChouJu-hsi, in his section on the artist in Transcending Turmoil, adds some useful notes on his activity as a painter and de- signer of series of woodblock-printed pictures. To the sources used in these studies another can be added, an inscription written in 1862, after Ren's death, by his patron Yao Xie 1OL % as a col- ophon to an album that Ren probably painted around 1851.10 There are some inconsistencies among the various accounts and sources, but a tentative biographical outline can be pieced to- gether.
Ren Xiong was born in 1823 into a poor fam- ily in Xiaoshan a LI, southeast of Hangzhou in northern Zhejiang. His father died when he was still a child. He studied painting with a local por- traitist but left, the story goes, because he want- ed to portray people as they looked instead of producing the conventional idealized images. "He was fond of portraying eccentric and ugly figures-those crippled, with one eye blinded, short of an arm or a leg, or hare-lipped. So the village master was very angry and drove him out of his house."" He set off on his wanderings, ac- cording to Yao Xie's colophon, in 1849, "carry- ing his qin X and his brush." According to an- other source he met a scholar-patron named Zhou Xian )X r in Qiantang (near Hangzhou) in 1848, and lived with him for three years, dur- ing which time he was able to study many old paintings-including, we may assume, the works of the late Ming master Chen Hongshou (1598- 1652), from whom he took more than from any other artist. Ren Xiong traveled with Zhou Xian to a number of places, including Ningpo, where he met the litterateur and amateur painter Yao Xie (1805-64). Another version has it that the two met in Shanghai when Ren was selling his paintings in the marketplace there. They became friends, and Ren lived in Yao's household for about a year, from 1850 to 1851 (or, if we follow Yao Xie's colophon, from 1849 to the autumn of
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1850). During this period Ren Xiong designed a set of woodblock-printed playing cards for Yao, depicting the Shuihu zhuan 7J( , I or "Water Margin" heroes, for use in drinking parties, fol- lowing the model of Chen Hongshou's series. He also painted one hundred twenty album leaves illustrating lines from poems by Yao Xie; this set of paintings is preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing. 12 By this time Ren Xiong was achieving a degree of financial stability and attracting some attention as a painter.
Some time in 1851 he was in Shanghai, which he visited on other occasions in his later years, drawn no doubt by its patronage and relative peace. In 1852-54 he -was mostly in Suzhou, where he was able to marry and have at least one child. But he could sell only enough paintings to per- mit a bare subsistence for himself and his family, including his parents, whom he had to support. From 1854, owing to the success of a set of play- ing cards he designed depicting Daoist immor- tals, the Liexian jiupai IJ fLU A Jt, which were published at his owrn expense in woodblock in that year, he was invited along with the block- cutter Cai Zhao r , by a patron named Wang Ling i * who lived in Ren's hometown, Xiao- shan, to produce more series of woodcut pictures. Two were completed, the Yu Yue xianxian xiang- zhuan zan 9 7t _* f* fg JR (Images of noted worthies of the Yue region) and the Xianxia xiang- zhuan @fg f,5 f- fg (Images of knights errant), both in 1856. A third, the Gaoshizhuan tuxiang i; ? X E E (Images of ancient lofty scholars), was left uncompleted on his death in the tenth lunar month of 1857.1' After he died, Zhou Xian re- ports, his family was so poor that friends had to help finance the funeral.
The question of Ren Xiong's involvement in historical events of his time, and especially in the military campaign waged by the Manchu govern- ment to put down the Taiping rebels, has under- standably been of special interest to P.R.C. schol- ars such as Zhang Anzhi, who suggested that in the period 1854-56 Ren joined the Qing gener- al Xiang Rong [nJ * at his headquarters near Nanjing, where the rebels had established their capital.'4 But this information comes from a sin- gle, not entirely reliable source, and other sources indicate that Ren was otherwise occupied in this period. It is true that he was a person of physical as well as artistic prowess-Zhou Xian describes him as good at horsemanship, archery, and wres- tling. And he was moving about among military men, some of them his patrons. One of them, a
general stationed in Zhenjiang, reportedly invit- ed him tojoin his staff in 1855; in 1853 his patron Zhou Xian had already discussed with him the pos- sibility of his enlisting in the army to fight the Tai- pings, who took Nanjing in that year. But Ren de- clined to enlist on both occasions, and there is no solid evidence that he held any position in any military unit at all. Zhang Anzhi's speculation that he may have been torn between commitment to the Qing forces and a sympathy for the Taiping rebels, and that in his last years he rejected the former and espoused the latter to adopt a revolu- tionary stance, thus seems unfounded.
Ren Xiong's Position in Late Chinese Painting
Whatever anguish Ren Xiong may have felt in the face of the warfare that ravaged theJiangnan region and the crushing conditions of his age, his paintings, perhaps with the single exception of the self-portrait, seem to betray little of it; they present on the whole the serene world of tradi- tional painting. At most, they suggest moods of melancholy, but of a kind that is easily absorbed into the familiar scenarios of absent lovers and the like. Perhaps, following Takeyoshi Tsuruta, we can read in the somber, heavy masses of leaves in some of his flower paintings, or even more in his 1850 Pheasants on a Rock (fig. 2), the "sense of dark hopelessness about the conditions of the time" that Tsuruta finds in the flower paintings of Zhao Zhiqian. 15 But the strongest impression left by a quick look over Ren Xiong's paintings is of an extraordinary diversity in subject and style; one may even wonder, at first, whether any per- sonal style can be recognized at all. This multi- farious character of Ren's painting might be il- lustrated by a single ten-leaf album, painted in 1852 and known now only through an old repro- duction book, 16 in the successive leaves of which he seems to aim at displaying the entire range of styles and subject types current in his time, in- cluding: a landscape in a loosened version of the Orthodox manner; a fisherman in the wet, sim- plified brush drawing of Xu Wei Jt M (who is named in the inscription); a military figure in the hard linear drawing of Chen Hongshou, and a bird on a flowering branch after the same mod- el; a close-up flower composition that follows the style of the Yangzhou master Li Shan a a while anticipating that of Zhao Zhiqian; a convention- al beautiful-lady picture; a strikingly original pic- ture of a swallow flying through willow branches;
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and, strangest of all, a still life in the European- ized mode (fig. 4).
Ren Xiong seems here to be summing up his heritage, or all of it that was potentially useful to him. It was not, for an artist working around the middle of the nineteenth century, a very healthy inheritance. The Orthodox school of landscape, in the period after Wang Yuanqi ? J1 N3, had survived only in a more or less comatose state, kept alive more by external factors, the lingering associations of the style with off'cialdom and li- terati high-culture values, than by any internal growth. In flower-and-bird painting, the techni- cal and stylistic innovations of the Yangzhou masters, especially Li Shan, remained to be fully exploited, as they were to be after Ren Xiong's time by Zhao Zhiqian and others. For figure painting there were the styles of Chen Hongshou and Huang Shen 3f tA, styles that were in some respects polar opposites, the cool versus the in- gratiating, the astringent versus (too often) the saccharine. And there were the genres of beauti- ful-women pictures and of portraiture. All of this did not add up to an internally compatible or viable stylistic repertory.
In individual works, however, Ren Xiong ex- ploits this ragtag legacy with sustained originali- ty. In a single year, 1855, he could do two pic- tures of standing women, one in the highly artificial Chen Hongshou manner, the other with the easy naturalism of someone unconcerned with old styles. 17 In his painting of pheasants on a rock done in 1850 (fig. 2) he develops, far beyond
the point to which any predecessor had taken it, the technique of working with opaque pigments, muted and somber colors, and a close packing of brushstrokes into a continuous surface. Quite apart from how one might interpret its darkness and heaviness, this is technically an astonishing work for its time, more than a decade before Zhao Zhiqian was to attempt anything of the kind.
An 1856 picture of a poised woman standing at a window holding a fan and coolly returning our gaze (fig. 3) similarly transfigures the con- ventional beautiful-lady type, giving emotional depth to the image and a look of intelligence to the woman, qualities not usually to be found in pictures of this genre. In some of his figure paint- ings Ren Xiong seems virtually to be inventing the Shanghai school manner as it would be de- veloped later by many others. 18 Some of the leaves in his albums based on Yao Xie's poems are re- freshingly liberated from old compositional types, brushwork systems, and restrictions on subject, as if lines of poetry could be translated directly into pictures, outside any pictorial tradition. 19 A few leaves in his undated album The Ten Myri- ads20 and his handscroll Thatched Cottage of Lake Fan, painted in 1855,21 indicate that with more time he might even have revitalized the linear mode of landscape, again taking it up more or less where Chen Hongshou had left it two centu- ries before. But all these, individually impressive as they are, remain as isolated achievements, scarcely constituting a unified oeuvre with any discernible direction and development.
go l w
FIG. 4. Ren Xiong, Still Life, one leaf of ten-leaf album dated 1852. Present whereabouts unknown. From Ren Wichang renwu huaniao ce, n.p., n.d.
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Ren Xiong's situation was not unlike that of his older contemporary Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) inJapan: a versatile, technically pro- ficient, highly creative artist born into the late and somewhat decadent stage of a tradition, when the types of painting available did not seem easi- ly susceptible to further development. Hokusai can be seen in his early and middle period to be casting about, trying everything, mastering sub- jects and styles, including the Westernizing man- ner, only to give them up and go on to others. He arrives at last at a synthesis in style and theme that is his own: the great landscape prints, the views of Mt. Fuji and others. But he does this at around the age of sixty-five, while Ren Xiong dies at thirty-four without ever quite achieving such a synthesis. Ren Xiong's art-historical predicament can be seen also as paralleling and aggravating the economic and daily-life predicament that he, like any otherJiangnan artist, faced at that time: in both their art and their lives the artists of this time and place were left with a sense of having nothing to hang on to, the sense that is expressed so trenchantly in Ren Xiong's inscription on his self-portrait, which will be considered below.
The Self-Portrait: The Impact of the Image
A number of featu:res of the self-portrait (fig. 1) arrest our gaze immediately, signaling that this will not be just another Chinese portrait. One is its size: since the figure is about 5'3" tall and Ren Xiong is described by Zhou Xian as having been small of stature, the painting must be close to life size-perhaps exactly so, by design. If the whole figure had been painted in a realistic, "brushless" manner (i.e., without conspicuous brushstrokes) consistent with the rendering of the head and upper torso, we would in effect be confronted by the man as he might have seen himself in a full-length mirror.22 But that effect is violently denied by the harsh, heavy-line draw- ing of the robe, trousers, and shoes and by the disproportion in size-the shoes are broader than the head and absurdly distorted. From top to bot- tom the figure transforms abruptly from quasi- photograph to quasi-cartoon. The broad-based shape of the figure gives it stability, a quality that Ren Xiong no doubt wanted to impart to his self- image, however inappropriate it may have been to his reality. He appears solidly set on the ground, centered like a kung-fu master. One may be reminded of German Expressionist figures, for
instance those in early Feininger drawings or Sim- plicissimus cartoons, with their stolid, wide-flar- ing trousers. This distortion concentrates the ex- pressive intensity at the top, in the head, for an effect that matches Zhou Xian's description of Ren as "intense and fierce, with a heroic look in his eyes." (Zhou tells us also that he had a vora- cious appetite and a great capacity for wine.)
The enlargement of the feet and lower parts also has the effect of making them seem closer to the viewer, so that Ren Xiong seems to look down at us-as indeed he would have, with the painting hanging in the normal way on the wall and the viewer standing on the floor. A "person of short stature" has elevated himself into monu- mentality. The starkness of the costume and ab- sence of any ornament, the dramatic envelop- ment of the body by the robe, enhance this effect. Ren Xiong stands as if on a stage, more posed than poised, staring defiantly out at us, assuming a role; but the player wears neither mask nor make- up and is entirely himself: the drama at which we are spectators is the predicament of Ren Xiong.
Another aspect of the work is well caught by Richard Vinograd:
Portraits of young men are rare in general in China, and those we have encountered are images of sensitive young esthetes or bon vivants. Ren Xiong's "Self Por- trait" could be an image of a street tough, and .a good deal of the shock it conveys has to do with its assertions of young, muscular health and physicality as implied values in the self-image of a painter. In the overall con- text, the lowered robe suggests a fighter's pose, and the crossed, nearly clasped hands are centered tensely above some slashing vertical pleats of the trousers that have a remarkably sword-like character. It is as if Ren has painted an almost contemptuously minimally dis- guised image of himself as a young swordsman.23
The striking disparity in manner of rendering body and robe, to return to that, is similar to- although far more radical than-the disparity that Norman Bryson points out in writing about a Watteau Concert, where, by contrast, it is the fig- ure that is more loosely described:
[I]n the most daring area of the canvas, where a small girl is seen against a cello, Watteau risks the astonish- ing effect of painting the instrument in a high finish, "Dutch" manner with invisible brushwork and empha- sized texture and reflection, while the figure of the girl is painted in broad, dry strokes .. . as though a paint- ing of a girl stood next to a real cello.... The result of the stage/life ambiguity is both to coax and to disap- point the interpretative glance.24
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FiG. 5. Chen Hongshou, A Tall Pine and Daoist Immortal (The Artist and His Nephew in a Landscape), dated 1635, hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk,
V ~~~202 x 97.8 cm (detail). |r' National Palace Museum, Taibei.
The Watteau painting in which this passage is found creates, for Bryson, deliberate ambiguities between the world of "coded meaning," whether of drama or painting, and the world of "life." Ren Xiong's figure similarly has something of the character of a player who has stepped before the curtain, still in a liminal status, situated between reality and artifice.
A pronounced discrepancy between body and costume, or between figure and setting, was of course common in Chinese portraits of the later centuries; virtually all Chinese portraiture, in fact, appears to place "real" people in conventionally rendered surroundings. But a discrepancy toler- ated at the hands of lesser masters became a de- liberately employed expressive device in the hands of greater ones, who turned the jarring effect on the viewer of this mismatch to the con- scious end of problematizing the idea of portrai- ture. Chinese writers on the subject have tended to make the distinction between portraiture (xiaoxianghua M M f) and figure painting ( ren- wu hua k, iZ i-1) clear and unproblematic, and
so it is, much of the time. But some of their best artists have worked against that clarity in their portraits, confounding conventions, creating ambiguities. Foremost among them was Chen Hongshou, whose 1635 self-portrait in a land- scape (fig. 5) is an extreme example of "real" person in conventionalized setting. 25 Seeing it beside Ren Xiong's painting, unlike as the two seem at first, reveals that they have telling affini- ties, beginning with the simple one that they are both self-representations of brilliant but embit- tered artists in their thirties. There is no reason to believe that Ren Xiong knew this particular work, but he understood well enough Chen's method of playing against the peculiarities of the Chinese portrait tradition.
In spite of the Chinese theorists' insistence on the primacy of the face in revealing the charac- ter of the person portrayed, Chinese portraiture, especially in the later periods, relied more heavi- ly on two other means of characterization: the device of accompanying the figure with attributes and elements of setting that carried established
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meanings; and the double-image device in which a recognizable portrayal of the sitter is superim- posed on the conventional image of some per- sonage or type fromi the past. Chen Hongshou draws on both devices in his self-portraits. In one painted in 162726 he makes his self-image into a kind of renwu or type, that of the cultivated man driven by some breakdown in human society of his time, as were the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, to seek solace in wine and withdrawal. In the 1635 work he utilizes both the double-image strategy, overlaying his picture on an established type, the solitary-wanderer-under-trees, and the setting that contributes to the characterization of the person portrayed-or, as here, comments on the situation of that person. Chen places a more or less believable image of himself in a land- scape so bizarre and artificial as to make the sty- listic disjuncture into a metaphor for alienation.
Ren Xiong allows himself no setting compara- ble to that in Chen's painting, but his costume- cloak, trousers, shoes-serves the same function and carries roughly the same message. It is drawn in the same hard, schematic way as the landscape in Chen Hongshou's picture and similarly offers no comfortable envelopment to the figure. Both visually within the work and in its mode of signi- fication, the costume seems to mediate between the organic body and the entirely conventional signs of the inscription.
Is Ren Xiong's self-portrait also a double im- age? And if so, what personage or type does he present himself as enacting here? I will attempt an answer to that question after considering the inscription.
The Self-Portrait: Its Insription
Three English translations of the inscription have been made, in the three English-language studies listed above.Jane Debevoise's was under- taken with the help of Cyril Birch, at that time our Chinese literature specialist at U.C. Berke- ley; Richard Vinograd used the Debevoise-Birch rendering and also consulted with Zhang Anzhi about its meaning. I have drawn on these freely and also had the help of my wife Tsao Hsingyuan M V_ I, who made several key suggestions that change somewhat the sense as others have con- strued it. So the rendering I offer reflects the efforts of seven trained and capable people; and yet Ren Xiong's inscription still resists our
collective attempt to reduce it to lucidity. Part of the difficulty lies in his use of a language and meter proper to dramatic lyrics, the kunqu M E, which was popular in theJiangnan region in Ren Xiong's time. My collaborative translation reads:
With the world in turmoil, what lies ahead of me? I smile and bow and go around flattering people in hope of making connections; but what do I know of affairs? In the great confusion, what is there to hold on to and rely on? How easy it is merely to chat about this!
If we try to talk [for contrast] about the heroic men [of the Han, such as] Jin t, Zhang 4, Xu :, and Shi 5, how many like them are left now? What is more pitiable is that black eyebrows change [succeed each other] in the mirror, and dust covers white heads [peo- ple stream through history, leaving no trace, like re- flections in a mirror]-and still we gallop along with- out goals. What is even more misleading and pitiable is that the historians haven't recorded, even disrespect- fully, a single word [about all these ordinary people]. As for the young gentlemen Pingxu -ff-1R [Emptiness] and Xiyou * 4 [Scarcely Exist, imaginary characters in Han literature], it's hard to take them as friends.
When I calculate back to my youth, I didn't start out thinking this way; with a sense of purpose I portrayed the ancients for display [as paragons]. But who are the ignorant ones, who are the sages? In the end, I have no idea. In the flash of a glance, all I can see is the bound- less void.
Composed by Ren Xiong, called Weichang, to the tune of "The Twelve Daily Records."
Richard Vinograd's discussion of the inscrip- tion is very good, and I would quote from it at length if space permitted. He notes that the tone is candid, perhaps even confessional, but cautions that we should "consider the possible rhetorical position of the statement" and points out that the use of a dramatic verse form suggests a con- sciously self-dramatized tone. Such suggestions certainly do not impugn the sincerity of Ren Xiong but only emphasize the complexity of read- ing that the work demands.
A complete discussion of the inscription is beyond my purpose; I would only note the seem- ing discrepancy between the last lines, in which he seems to renounce the practice of "portray- ing the ancients for display [as paragons]" and the fact that he went on portraying them in the woodblock-printed books of his last years, some of which must antedate the portrait, since he was
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chatu 71, ,J~ ~f 4jt 4' ~ ~~~~~~~ ~ (Illustrations to the Water
Margin), reprint of Ming- period illustrations, Beijing, People's Art Pub. Co, 1955.
working on the Gaoshi tu when he died. We can resolve this in part by following Vinograd in al- lowing for rhetoric in Ren's statement; but we can also recognize that carrying through fully the implications of the position he adopts in the in- scription would in effect have meant the end of his practice as a painter, since none of the sub- jects he represented in his paintings, or the ways he represented them, are true to the feelings expressed there. The deep disillusionment un- derlying the inscription had to be harbored at a level below that of his engagement in his profes- sional and social life, if he was to continue, and he needed to continue to survive. Perhaps it is this conflict, more than any conflict between pro- Taiping sentiments and involvement in the anti- Taiping campaign, that generates the tension which Zhang Anzhi and others have recognized in the work.
The Self-Portrait and Woodblock Print Imagery: Conclusion
Striking features of the painting, apart from the realism of the corporeal parts of the figure,
are the bare upper torso, the loose, voluminous cloak draped over it, and the broad trousers with huge shoes protruding below them. We are prob- ably safe in assuming that these did not make up Ren's actual everyday costume, and that they are significant elements in the self-image he offers us. So, what did they signify, for Ren and his au- dience? Clues can be found by looking to see what types of personages are represented with these features in the woodblock-printed pictures by Ren Xiong himself, Chen Hongshou, and the anonymous artists who illustrated military epics and novels, notably the Shuihu zhuan and Sanguo zhi
In these illustrations to popular stories, the bare-torsoed figure might be simply a brawling ruffian-participants in wrestling matches and other violent encounters are often depicted this wav-or he might be stripped for strenuous ac- tion, as when the Monk Hua T AJ in Shuihu zhuan uproots a willow tree (fig. 6). The bare- torsoed fighter is sometimes shown beating a rich- ly clad personage who is clearly his social superi- or (fig. 7), or even assaulting an armored figure, as when, in another Shuihu zhuan illustration (fig. 8), the ghost of Zhang Shun m hII kills Fang
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FIG. 12. Ren Xiong He Xun, woodblock print. From same source as fig. 11.
Tianding :1 f t. Like the swordsmen ofJapa- nese chambara films, the hero is made virtually invincible by his moral superiority.
Shijin _ A, one of the Shuihu heroes, as seen in Chen Hongshou's print (fig. 9), had his up- per torso tattooed with a nine-dragon pattern and always took his shirt off when he fought. He is sometimes shown in these prints practicing mar- tial exercises, his tattoo reinforcing the vigor of his movements. Another of the Shuihu figures, Shi Xiu E *, as portrayed in another of Chen Hongshou's pictures performing strengthening exercises (fig. 10), wears a loose robe similar to Ren Xiong's, with the upper part of his body pro- jecting above it. Loose costumes (the Japanese gi
are still worn by practitioners of the martial arts. The jagged angularity of the robe in Ren Xiong's painting follows a convention well estab- lished in woodblock prints as a way of conveying the fierceness and harsh energy of military fig- ures; we see it in a number of the figures in Chen Hongshou's Shuihu zhuan series (e.g., figs. 9 and 10), as well as in some of his paintings of the same
A
X~~~~~~~~~~~X
tIj
FIG. 13. Ren Xiong, Hexiao Zhangren, woodblock print, from Gaoshi zhuan tuxiang, 1857. From 1877 reprint,
collection of the author.
period, the 1630s.27 Ren Xiong puts this mode of drawing to striking use in his picture of Wang Lin TE t (fig. 11), another native of Zhejiang and one of the figures in his series of Images of Noted Worthies of the Yue Region.
The bare torso and loose clothing can have implications of informality and even sensuality, as in Luo Ping's , Al famous 1760 portrait ofJin Nong ! P, asleep in a garden.28 They can also signify high-minded reclusion, as in Ren Xiong's imaginary portrait of the early fourth-century He Xun R fJi, another of his Images of Noted Worthies of the YueRegion (fig. 12.) He Xun, who came from Shaoxing near Ren's birthplace, was a virtuous and effective administrator who repeatedly reject- ed offers of high ministerial posts from a succes- sion of rulers, always pleading sickness.
Another of Ren Xiong's imaginary portraits, this time from the unfinished Gaoshi zhuan se- ries, is of Hexiao Zhangren X C A ;JZ k, whom Ren dresses in a costume similar to his own in the self-portrait (fig. 13.) This was a rustic who, when asked by Confucius's disciple Zilu -T i
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whether he had seen the Master, spoke contemp- tuously of the sage as one whose four limbs didn't move (out of laziness) and who couldn't tell the five grains apart; how, he asked, could one take such a person as master?
Putting these together-without meaning to suggest that all of them or any one of them can be simply transferred to Ren Xiong's self-image- we have the following composite characterization: a person of low-class origins, of martial skills, ar- dor, and strength; a person of low status capable of besting his superiors should the circumstanc- es arise; a person who, although of great poten- tial value to the ruling powers, stays out of their service by choice; a person who perceives the weaknesses of the self-proclaimed sages of his day and is willing to criticize them. We cannot, I think, be more specific in applying any of these to Ren Xiong's feelings about the Taipings or any other particular issue of his time. But, in conjunction with the inscription in which he laments bitterly the passing through history, unrecorded and in- effectual, of myriads of ordinary people and ex- presses his own feelings of frustration and help- lessness, his cynicism now about traditional values that he had accepted blindly before, the implica- tions of the picture become clearer. And we must set both painting and inscription within the con- text of Ren Xiong's own situation as a man of no rank or status making his way by his talents among well-established gentry patrons, rich merchants, military officials, meanwhile struggling simply to
survive under the worst of conditions. Where his inscription states the hopelessness of his situa- tion as powerfully and bleakly as he could, the self-portrait conveys with equal power his defi- ance of the role and the predicament into which history has thrust him. The central import of the work lies ultimately in the contradiction between the two: in another age, it says, I might have been a hero, someone who bettered the state of the world, a significant player on the stage of histo- ry. As it is, I can onlyjoin the myriads who disap- pear without trace, like reflections in a mirror.
And yet, through the act of writing this inscrip- tion and painting this picture, along with all his others, Ren ensures that he will not disappear without trace. A final question that the work pre- sents, the question of whom it can have been addressed to, can now be answered: to the world at large, to anyone who would look and read and get the message. This was not a painting of the same type as, for instance, Zheng Xia's X fk Des- titute People scroll of the Northern Song or Zhou Chen's jW E Beggars and Street Characters (if we believe the colophons) of the Ming 19-paintings that, by portraying movingly an intolerable situ- ation, meant to change it. The portrait would be, as the artist surely realized, as ineffectual as Ren Xiong himself, except for the psychological sat- isfaction that painting it must have brought him and the deepening of his reputation that it would bring for him in ages to come.
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1. In writing this I do not mean to diminish the achievement of Claudia Brown andJu-hsi Chou in their exhibition and catalogue Transcending Tur- moil: Painting at the Close of China's Empire 1796- 1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992.) Their research, and their assembling of paintings by nine- teenth-century masters that present them for the most part at their best, open the way for the inclu- sion of painting of this period in our histories with a fullness that was not possible before. I am aware also that value judgments, which must be in some part (but not entirely) subjective and culturally conditioned, and even more the identification of masterworks, are unpopular today in art-historical circles, invoking charges of canon-formation and perpetuation of biases. Many years of working with this material, however, and the viewing of thou- sands of the paintings, have convinced me of the basic truth of my statement.
2. James Cahill, The CompellingImage: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UJniversity Press, 1982), chap. 4 passim.
3. Zhang Anzhi, "Ren Xiong heta di zihua xiang" (Ren Xiong and his self-portrait), Gugong bowuyuan yuankan, no. 2 (1979): 13-18.
4. Jane Debevoise, "Some Working Notes on the Art of Ren Xiong," unpublished paper, June 1982.
5. Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600-1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 128-30.
6. Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Mastenvorks of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City (Lansdale, Pa.: International Arts Council, 1988), cat. no. 73, pp. 203-4.
7. For presentation at the symposium "Chinese Paint- ing of the Ming and Qing Dynasties," Cleveland Museum of Art, 6-7 May 1989.
8. Gong Sanxing, "Ren Weichang shengping shi-lue kao" (Research on the biography of Ren Wei- chang), Meishuyenjiu, no. 4 (1981): 86-88.
9. Stella Lee, "The Figure Paintings of Ren Bonian (1840-1896): The Emergence of a Popular Style in Late Chinese Painting" (Ph.D. dissertation, Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, 1981), 67-75.
10. This album, in the Ching Yfian Chai Collection, Berkeley, is no. 59 in the Transcending Turmoil
catalogue; Yao Xie's inscription is translated on pp. 165-66.
12. The albums have been published only in part: see Ren Xiong Yao Xie shiyi tuce (Shanghai: People's Art Publishing Co., 1981), a selection of eighteen of the leaves.
13. See Wang Zidou, "Ren Xiong xiuxiang muke ren- wu sizhong" (Four series of elegant figural wood- cuts by Ren Xiong), Zhongguo meishu 13 (1986): 44-59. A shorter discussion of them is in the pref- ace to the book edited by the same author in which many of the prints are reproduced, Ren Weichang muke renwu (Figural woodcuts by Ren Xiong) (Shanghai: People's Art Publishing Co., 1959).
14. On the possible relationship between Ren Xiong and Xiang Rong, see also Transcending Turmoil, 160 and n. 231.
16. Ren Weichang renwu huaniao ce M A YE fflJ, album of ten leaves, one dated 1852, collec- tion of Liu Huairui, Shanghai? n.p., n.d.
17. For the painting in Chen Hongshou style, see Nan- jingbowuyuan canghua (Nanjing, 1981), pl. 95; for the other, Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe canghua xuan (Tianjin, 1984), pl. 1, a representation of "Yuannui Passing on the Scripture."
18. E.g., in a series of six hanging scrolls making up a screen, painted in 1850 and representing Daoist fairies and auspicious symbols, in the collection of the Affiliated School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. SeeJames Cahill, Richard Vino- grad, and Xue Yongnian, ed., New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Paintings (Shanghai: Shanghai Painting and Calligraphy Press, forthcoming), no. 58.
19. The suggestion has been made that Ren Xiong in these leaves draws in some part on the styles of Japanese paintings that he might have seen in Shanghai at this time, when trade with Japan was already flourishing. The suggestion is promising and persuasive but cannot be pursued here.
20. See Nie Chongzheng, "Ren Xiong ji qi 'Shiwan tuce"' (Ren Xiong and his "Ten Myriads" album), Gugong bowuyuan yuankan, no. 1 (1983): 61-64 and pl. 1-3. The album as a whole has been published
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as Ren Xiong Shiwan huace (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1989).
21. Shanghai Museum; see Transcending Turmoil, no. 61.
22. As Ren Xiong may in fact have done. One leaf in an album offenben ) * sketches for paintings (or after paintings) by the Shanghai master Qian Huian O V t (1833-1911), many of them intend- ed for reproduction by lithography in picture books, in the collection of the Affiliated School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (see n. 18 above) with leaves dated 1893 and 1895, presents an old woman gazing at herself in a full-length mirror. Whether the full-length mirror was available to Ren Xiong forty years earlier is a question I cannot answer.
23. Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, 128.
24. Norman Bryson, "Watteau and Reverie: A Test Case in 'Combined Analysis,"' The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation 22, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 97-1 26.
25. See n. 2 above. The contrived and controlled in- terplay between artifice and "reality" in Chen Hongshou's figure paintings is the main theme of my chapter.
26. Cahill, Compelling Image, fig. 4.1.
27. A good example is Chen Hongshou's painting of the two Han-period generals Su Wu 4 A and Li Ling a R; seeJames Cahill, TheDistant Mountains: ChinesePainting oftheLateMingDynasty, 1570-1644 (Tokyo and New York: John Weatherhill, 1982), fig. 139.
28. Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, pl. 13.
29. James Cahill, Parting at the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle MingDynasty, 1368-1580 (Tok- yo and New York:John Weatherhill, 1978), pl. 12, fig. 88-89, and pp. 191-93.
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