Picturing the Shanghai Artist

Looks at portraits of the art world produced by Shanghai’s best-known artist, Ren Bonian (1840-1896). Unique for their near-exclusive focus on art world sitters, these are portraits in which the artist collaborated with their subjects to investigate an array of artistic identities, from conventional renderings of the artist as scholar and gentleman, to unexpected depictions of artists as men about town, failures, sell-outs and beggars. These are images that exceed portraiture’s usual purpose of documenting likeness and social status, instead seeking to comment on the modern Chinese artist’s engagement with a complex and demanding urban market and art world.

The Shanghai Artist in Advertising and Mass Media

Examines the relationships between Shanghai artists and their public and the establishment of these relationships through Shanghai’s growing mass media outlets. By exploiting the city’s burgeoning newspaper and publishing industries, artists promoted themselves as public figures and marketed themselves, their products and activities; through the mass media, they were able to access audiences on local, national and even international levels. By using newspaper advertising and articles, guide books, popular periodicals and collected writings, this chapter reveals the formation of the art world’s public image, promoted for consumption by an urban audience and mass readership.

The Shanghai Painted Fan

Addresses Shanghai painting through the fashionable painted fan. Often overlooked because of its modest size and ambitions, the fan’s identity as a mobile image and object of self-adornment boosted its popularity in late Qing Shanghai, appealing to consumer tastes for flamboyant display and conspicuous consumption. This chapter examines the ways in which the painted fan embodied Shanghai School painting through the use of popular subjects, dynamic styles and compositions, and its fusion of accessory and artwork. The fan is also examined as a fashionable and sought-after commodity, retailed and distributed through Shanghai’s glamorous fan and letter-paper shops, contributing to the growth of the city’s vigorous art market for an urban middle-class clientele.

Introduction

Offers a history and historiography of Shanghai and Shanghai art before turning to the unique circumstances of the late nineteenth-century art world. Taking advantage of Shanghai’s marketplace, professional artists took on multiple roles as entrepreneurs, celebrities, entertainers and public figures as well as image-makers. Serving a large and anonymous urban clientele, artists made contact with their audiences via fan paintings, art advertising and Shanghai’s growing mass media. The introduction highlights the book’s new avenues of inquiry, ranging from art world infrastructures, histories of mass media, print and reception and its use of primary sources such as the newspaper advertisements, the industrially-produced book, artist writings and period guidebooks.

Epilogue

The entwined ideas of artist, image, and audience are effectively embodied by an 1887 portrait by Ren Bonian of Jin Erzhen (1840–1917), also known as Jin Jishi (Figure e.1). A prominent calligrapher in this period, Jin Erzhen regularly appeared on the lists of Shanghai’s famous artists....

Shanghai Illustrations

Focuses on the active participation of artists in Shanghai’s publishing industry, specifically their contributions to the treaty port’s illustrated books and magazines. Capitalizing on the new technology of lithography, Shanghai rose swiftly to become China’s center of publishing in the late Qing, and pictures by Shanghai artists featured prominently in the city’s new mass media. By using case studies of several publishing projects from this period, including illustrated books and artist designs for magazine inserts, this chapter investigates how artists expanded their reputations, accessed a large urban readership and developed a mode of lithographed imagery that addressed a popular audience in their accessibility, topicality and playfulness.