Born in Shanghai, China in 1903, Guan Zilan became one of the most famous female artists in China in the 20th century. She was exposed to the world of art at a young age through her parents who were wealthy textile merchants. Guan went to school at the Shanghai Shenzhou Girls’ School before attending the China Art University where she studied western painting under the famous artist, Chen Baoyi. After graduating in 1927, Guan Zilan further pursued painting in Japan at the Tokyo Institute of Culture: Bunka Gakuin. It was in Japan that Guan was greatly influenced by western modern art, especially post-impressionism and, more notably, fauvism and in 1929, at the age of 26, Guan Zilan painted her most famous work, Portrait of Miss L. (shown below). As a female artist trained in western styles –a rare sight at the time– Guan became very popular in both Japan and China and was regarded as an embodiment of the “modern girl.” After her return to China in 1930, Guan became a professor at a Shanghai art college, where she continued to be very popular and was a leader among female artists until the start of the Cultural Revolution when she stopped painting.

Guan Zilan – Portrait of Miss L. Oil on Canvas. 1929.

Source: A Century in Crisis, Page 63 (Figure 62).

Works Referenced:

Andrews, Julia Frances., and Kuiyi Shen. “Art in the New Culture of the 1920s.” The Art of Modern China. Berkeley: U of California, 2012. 70-71.

Andrews, Julia Frances, and Kuiyi Shen. “The Lure of the West: Modern Chinese Oil Painting.” In A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998. 172-78.

Lü Peng. A History of Art in 20th Century China. Milano: Charta, 2010. 286-8.

Pickowicz, Paul G., Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang. Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 206-29.