Abstract
Art Worlds opens with Ren Bonian's Picture of Three Friends, containing the artist's self-portrait along with a prominent Shanghai art dealer and a third figure who was likely another artist. This painting seems to depict a business meeting disguised as an old-fashioned literati “elegant gathering,” complete with books and scrolls (pp. 1–3). The implied ambiguity of their relationship (friends, clients, or colleagues?) pointed to the nuanced social ranking in Shanghai. Because portraiture was just a small portion of Ren's output, reserved for people he knew personally, we can be certain that this painting went beyond the purely transactional. In-depth analyses of the exact nature of these private images are left to the last chapter. Those preceding it describe exchanges between artists and strangers. Rather than espousing such lofty goals as self-cultivation and nationalist empowerment, Shanghai artists had no qualms about being associated with the culture of amusement and entertainment. Even as China suffered internal turmoil and external threats, its trauma is barely reflected in their repertoires. Their whimsical pictures of flora and fauna, animals and folklore attracted both Chinese and foreign (Japanese and Korean) customers.1 One of Wue's major arguments is that modernity in Chinese art need not be about radical breaks with traditional genres and media. Change as “embraced in the emphasis on being seen by new forms of the public,” the acknowledgment of “certainties becoming less than certain,” as well as the sensitivity to “fleeting time” more accurately define the rhetoric of Shanghai modernity (pp. 18–19).