From her humble beginnings as an orphan sold into prostitution, Pan Yuliang’s peripatetic life – as a revolutionary artist, pedagogue, and “New Woman” forged during the cultural and sociopolitical reform front known as the May Fourth Movement – was intimately intertwined with modern art movements and geopolitical ruptures throughout the twentieth century. Back of Nude (1946) exemplifies Yuliang’s unique approach to female nudes that often combines the fine-line technique from the Chinese pictorial tradition – with an inherent rigour to the expressive articulation of form – with a Fauvist liberty in colour and space. The curious shimmers down the seated figure’s spine and right torso suggest a light source that seemingly contradicts the somewhat muted, open landscape of riverbank and palm trees. Existing examples of almost identical figures with different backgrounds suggest an experiment with genre and modes of storytelling, where Orientalising tendencies – a hallmark of European modernism – intersects with the cosmopolitan imagination of a diasporic artist. Chen Duxiu, one of the key cultural and political figures in the New Culture Movement, commented in 1937 that Yuliang’s paintings “derive their spirit from European oil painting and sculptures while retaining the Chinese fine-line technique ... a style that I define as new fine-line, an assessment [with which] Yuliang herself is in agreement”.
This is the first time the work of Pan Yuliang is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Xin Wang
