Redefining Femininity

Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) was among the first generation of female Chinese artists to attend the modern art institutions and study in France becoming an advocate for the merging of Chinese and western cultures. Chinese modern art school established a new wave of artists in response to westernization. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, China’s encounters with Western ideologies allowed Chinese intellectuals to question age-old paradigms of virtues.² In 1919, the objections of traditional Chinese views came to a head with May the Fourth Movement, a movement in which China ushered in a new era of intellectual, cultural, and social change.¹

Many artists at the time viewed Western art as synonymous with modernization, technology, and industrial standard.¹ As a result, they began to incorporate styles and subject matters from various modernists movements in Europe in their own work. Pan Yuliang was attracted to Henri Matisse's style in her paintings. Matisse uses bright colors, bold brushwork, acute observations, and female figures.² Pan Yuliang's artwork often favored fauvism and the female nude is one of the main bodies of her work that established her in international art circles.⁴

As newly- established art schools underwent this transformation, the modern ideologies of female depictions came into focus. This cultural shift resulted in a break from Confucius's iconography of female subjects as delicate flowers or butterflies but rather viewed as independent subjects. This new-found independence concerning the female body allowed for the ushering of the modern female integrated with an awareness of their rights and liberation. The aptest metaphor for this period of time of female liberation is the painting of the female nude.²

In the 1920s Shanghai Art Academy adopted the European academies of painting from female nude models which were considered by most twentieth-century art educators to be essential basic training in the technique of anatomy. This resulted in nude painting controversy from political authorities to interfere with the academy’s curriculum, garnered by one of the pioneers of Chinese modern art and the director of Shanghai Art Academy, Lui Haisu.³ He defended this idea by proclaiming the woman’s body as a tool to inspire the male artist. This notion became complicated when female artists took up the nude subject technique.

Pan Yuliang was among these female art students with the ability to expand on the basic training to form the female nude to become a symbol of the West, modernity, and freedom. Unlike her male counterpart, she exemplifies the era of female liberation by the female nude becoming a central theme in her works.⁵ Pan Yuliang bore personal witness to the struggles of women as her parents died at a young age and she was then sold to a brothel. Her life took a turn for the better after marriage to a government official who supported her artistic aspirations and studies abroad in France.²

Pan embraced the controversial subject, not by emphasizing the male gaze and self-objection, but rather using the nude to represent the subject and object relationship and allow for an exploration of identity in a male-dominated art world. She claimed authorship as a female painting the female nude. Rather than objectifying the painted subject, she reclaimed it by projecting herself onto the subject and negate the stigma of her youth.

From the 1940s to the 1950s, the commodification of the female body moved from the art classroom to the public display to “sell happiness.”² Although Pan’s painting at this time period did not commodify the nude, she similarly had desires to embrace the modern female. The merging of Chinese and western cultures is prevalent in her mature period (1940-50) work which represents the fusing of east and west utilizing traditional Chinese mediums of ink brush and color to the modern subject of the female nude. Her modernist art embodies a blend of eastern and western traditions elaborating upon social issues such as the excessive promotion of masculinity and the emergence of feminism.⁴