Art Worlds by Roberta Wue

Author:Roberta Wue [Wue, Roberta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art History
ISBN: 9789888313440
Publisher: HongKongUP
Published: 2014-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.22 Ren Xun, Okapi, lithograph, Dianshizhai conghua [Collected images from Dianshizhai] (Shanghai, 1886), fascicle 6, p. 3a

Not all of Ren Xun’s insert designs first published in Dianshizhai huabao made their way into Dianshizhai conghua. His elaborate series of Buddhist figures, for example, does not reappear in the collectanea, perhaps because they spun off into their own separate volume, Shiliu luohan yingzhentu huapu (Painting manual of pictures of the sixteen arhats).60 The designs by Ren Xun that are reprinted in Dianshizhai conghua appear to be “one-offs” rather than part of a series, and often display a sense of playfulness. Such images did not require readers to be familiar with Ren’s works, but they did rely on reader familiarity with the themes, formulae, and tropes of Shanghai painting in order to get the joke. The foreign could certainly serve as its own category of diversion; Lai Yu-chih has pointed out the importance of Dianshizhai conghua in documenting the presence of Japanese images in Shanghai. A considerable number of Japanese images made their way into Dianshizhai conghua, albeit with sources and authorship removed.61 The absence of any credit does not mean that these contributions went unnoted. A Ren Xun Dianshizhai huabao insert not reprinted in Dianshizhai conghua, but which may be grouped with these one-offs, is his design of a cat cleaning itself, an image possibly based on Japanese sources (Figure 3.23). Cat paintings were a distinctive Shanghai painting genre: Ren Xun’s is an ostensible variation on a standard subject of cats and butterflies, the combination of which formed a homophonous and auspicious rebus for old age and longevity. However, this image’s conventional meanings are eclipsed by its more daring content, summed up by the cat’s suggestive and splay-legged pose. The combination of feline subject and sexualized content was not entirely unfamiliar to Dianshizhai huabao readers, who would have encountered the cat in the magazine’s development of a Shanghai urban iconography that was itself not without a strong sexual element.62

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