rediscovering the fine art of Pan Yuliang

In 1984, mystified researchers began cataloguing the prolific but unfamiliar archives of an artist who had been all but been erased from the nation’s history of art. 

Unsure of what to make of this “misfit” artist in China’s nationalist narrative, it wasn’t until several years later that her forgotten legacy was reintroduced to collectors of the modern world. 

Pan Yuliang self portrait

Pan Yuliang, formerly known as Chen Xiuqing was born on June 14,1895 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. Later, she changed her name to Zhang Yuliang. in 1913, she married Pan Zanhua and took his surname, Pan.

Pan Yuliang was a feminine tour de force who straddled the Western and Eastern art world as one of China’s first Modernist artists. She studied oil painting in France, sculpture in Italy, ink painting in China - a prolific artist who created over four thousand artworks in her lifetime

Pan Yuliang, China's modern & contemporary artist

Today, most of her art remains at a provincial museum in China, where her estate was first sent in the mid 1980s. For clues of Pan Yuliang in Paris, you can see some of her works at the Cernuschi Museum - a little musée tucked inside a hôtel particulier by Park Monceau.

There was both a 2004 Chinese television series on her life entitled “Hua Hun: Pan Yuliang” and a full length movie, A Soul Haunted by Painting (1994). The scattered legacy of one of China’s first modern woman artists is laid out in a moving video by Mia Yu, "Pan Yuliang: A Journey of Silence," for a 2017 exhibit in Berlin.