YULIN YU | Undergrad life
Presentation draft showed below
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Yulin Yu, I am an undergraduate student who is enthusiastic about the philosophy behind visual communication. Today, I would like to share a story of self-identification through “Ren Xiong’s Self Portrait”.
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Self-Portrait might sound like a distant concept to you, however, it is actually a common modern phenomenon. Take selfies for example - do we use our phones to “draw” our portraits? One interesting thing I noticed about self-portraits, especially in China, is that the selfies people show on social media or dating websites are often different from what the person looks like in real life. In their selfies, they might be someone with a slimmer and whiter body, someone playing piano, or someone with their eyes closed and dreaming. I found this phenomenon to be compelling.
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Why do people like to present their selfies and why do they always present themselves in a modified way?
I would like to use Ren Xiong’s Self-Portrait to illustrate what, how, and why people present themselves in a modified way. At the very beginning, I would like to tell you why I chose this painting to illustrate the issue of self-identification. First, an obvious reason is that I love this painting. Ren Xiong’s Self-Portrait attracted me immediately after I saw it. Second, Ren Xiong’s Self-Portrait appears in almost every book about Chinese Art. It a standard of its medium. Third, this special self-portrait brought in a new way of self-presentation to the 20th century. It changed the rules of self-presentation from that point forward.
Li Peng (c. 1060-1110)
Tao's return to seclusion in the mountains,
Ink and Brush on Slik
If we want to understand how Ren Xiong’s Self-Portrait changed the game of self-presentation, we need know what happened before Ren Xiong’s innovation. Let’s look at some examples in the Chinese historical context. Initially, we should think about the kind of person who would produce a “self-portrait”. One interesting fact is that a “real self-portrait” hadn’t existed until the 17th century. So how did people present themselves before this time? They drew famous scholarly officials’ portraits to compare themselves with them. The general appearances of these portraits are ink colors, skinny figures, and loose robes.
Self-portraits by the modern definition, which is a painter painting themselves into the canvas, appear around the 17th century. The first recognizable Chinese self-portrait is created by Chen Hongshou. Art History scholars identify Chen Hongshou as Ren Xiong’s “teacher”. Chen presents himself by aligning himself with a historical scholar, Tao Qian. He does this so that he may associate himself with Tao’s famous characteristics - a simple, direct, and unmannered lifestyle.
Two Portraits by Chen Hongshou, (1598–1652)
Finally, Ren Xiong appears. Ren Xiong played a role as both a painter and scholarly official in the 19th century. He created a self-portrait in order to present himself as a military hero who serves the country while showing his literati pursuits as a highly-educated thinker. Ren Xiong presented his self-identify by applying historical and innovative icons on his self-portrait. Here are some examples.
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One of the icons he presents is a bare-chest, which he uses to demonstrate himself as a physically powerful person. Bare-chests are rare to see in portraits which refer to self-identification. James Cahill, one of the world’s leading Chinese art historians, finds that bare-chested figures have the meaning related to historical context. <P>In these historical works, such as the illustration in “all men are brothers” æ°´æµ’ä¼ , bare chests are depicting social hero who fights through a unique form of power. Thus, he explains the meaning of the bare-chest scene in the self-portrait as Ren expressing himself as a social hero.
Next, we will talk about the very angular clothes draped in the self-portrait. It is a technique with meaning both in history and new self-presentation. The angular brush strokes originated from the stone crave around the Qing and Han dynasty. These dynasties are also the start of calligraphy, which emphasizes the strangeness of the strokes. However, this style hadn’t been used in painting, especially portrait painting before Ren Xiong. I have already found some evidence for answering the second question, the meaning of the angular clothes. According to James Cahills and Richard Vinogard the style or meaning of the self-portrait has a close relationship to Ren’s woodblock print series. Ren depicted different heroes in these woodblock prints. All of these heroes depict either historical heroes or heroes in the All Men Are Brothers(æ°´æµ’ä¼ ). After comparing the use of the lines depicting different characters, Ren used different lines to depict different figures that had different social classes, personality, and occupations. For example, he depicted the clothing of a rich governor with smooth and flowing lines, while he depicted the poor scholar-official’s clothing with angular struggle lines. Since Ren also used acutely angular lines in his self-portrait, he probably wanted to construct himself as a parallel to Yue Dafu, Jin Taifu, or Song Taichang all of whom were leisurely scholar-officials in the woodblock print series.
Ren Xiong painted himself as a modeling face for challenging the history of literative painting. The modeling depiction of Ren’s face and body conflicts with traditional Chinese painting values. His head in the painting is realistically rendered. Both light and shadow are explicit. The elements of the face are anatomically correct. The face is very naturalistic and the head is depicted skillfully. All the details I mentioned can be described as modeling. This modeling is a conflict to the traditional Chinese painting value. Traditional Chinese painters relied on lines, the mark of the inked brush, and rejected the depiction of objects with light and shadow. The values of traditional Chinese paintings conveyed that the depiction should not only describe the appearance of a subject, but more importantly, the inner essence of a portrait including its energy, spirit, and life force. Thus, painters tried to avoid the modeling skill. However, Ren Xiong brings this light and shadow into literative painting and influenced the later Shanghai School. He told the history that color, as well as light and shadow, can be used to describe spirit.
The inscription presents Ren Xiong’s pride in joining the army by creating literative contrast as well as referencing his favorite parts of history. Richard Vinograd analyzed the inscription by interpreting the meaning of this self-portrait. He makes two hypotheses. First, that the contrast between poor and rich in the inscription is a metaphor between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Qing government, which corresponds to the historical background and the record of Ren’s willingness to join the war. Another hypothesis is that some words in the inscription may borrow from historical literary illustrations and drama. Vinograd suggests that the illustration is probably related to the woodblock illustration of the four literary heroes series that Ren Xiong created.
Ren Xiong’s self-identification reacts to history as well as innovates a new way to present himself as a very special character, who is creative, brave, intelligent, strong and patriotic. The goal of an artist’s self-identification is to present artistic merit as realistic as possible to audiences so that he may share his experience with history as well as his outlook to future.
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