This short essay compares two nineteenth-century self-portraits as signs of a renewed worldview in East and West: Ren Xiong’s full-length self-portrait and Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait as a Bonze (1888). The author notes that self-portraiture was rare in traditional Chinese painting and argues that Ren Xiong (1823–1857), working at a time of growing foreign influence, no longer uses landscape to filter his emotions but confronts the viewer directly. His stern gaze, the sharp, broken lines of his robe set against the soft, naturalistic modelling of face and limbs, and the deliberately distorted proportions combine physicality and abstraction and give the figure a monumental, almost combative presence. Unlike Bada Shanren, who expressed suffering through metaphor, Ren presents himself as an intellectual-warrior aware of the approaching end of the Qing dynasty and of the need for change. Van Gogh’s portrait, by contrast, shows the artist shorn like a monk, seeking a humbler role as mediator with nature. The essay concludes that both works reveal artists conscious of a shift in how the world should be seen and represented: one turning towards social and historical responsibility, the other towards a renewed balance with nature.