Pan Yuliang, Self-portrait in front of window, oil on canvas, date unknown. Artnet.com
(http://www.artnet.com/artists/pan-yuliang/self-portrait-in-front-of-window-Ib9j_dTwi0XsBvO01_7zlw2)

 

Pan Yuliang, born on June 14, 1895 in Yangzhou, is known for being one of the first Chinese women to paint in the Western style. After being orphaned at a young age, Yuliang was adopted by her mother’s brother and was then sold into a brothel as a result of an extremely impoverished life and the 1911 Revolution (Thein 2018). She then met Pan Zanhua, a customs official, who removed her from the brothel and made her his second wife; however instead of taking Yuliang into his household, Zanhua settled her in Shanghai in 1916 where she learned to read and write (Teo 2016, 37). Yuliang was then invited to study for two years at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1923 (Thein 2018). From here, Pan Yuliang would go on to produce over 4,000 works of art with a majority of paintings depicting women, overwhelmingly nudes, self-portraits and portraits of other women (Teo 2016, 36). Her modernist art embodies a fusion of eastern and western traditions elaborating upon social issues such as the excessive promotion of masculinity and the emergence of feminism (Teo 2016, 36). Yuliang died in Paris in 1977 and lived a life largely affected by the cultural movements in China, residing in Paris for 40 years, never to return home.

 

 

Bibliography

Teo, Phyllis. Rewriting Modernism: Three Women Artists in Twentieth-Century China:  Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou, and Yin Xiuzhen. Chicago: Leiden University Press, 2016.

 

Thein, Madeline. “From Republican-Era Shanghai to Postwar Paris: Pan Yuliang’s Bold Portraits.”Last modified March 12 2018. https://frieze.com/article/republican-er a-shanghai- postwar-paris-pan-yuliangsboldportraits.