Pan Yuliang

Self-portrait. Bronze, 1951. Musée Cernuschi Pan Yuliang (Chinese: 潘玉良, 14 June 1895 – 22 July 1977), born as Chen Xiuqing, also known as Zhang Yuliang (張玉良), is remembered as the first woman in China to paint in the Western style. She studied in Shanghai, Lyon, Paris and Rome, and taught at the École des Beaux Arts. She is one of the earliest Chinese women to receive formal instruction in Oil Painting and Life Drawing. After that, she developed a distinctive hybrid style, which made the combination between European modernist techniques and Chinese traditional pictorial sensibilities. Recent scholarship recognized Pan as one of the most important modern Chinese woman artists, who discussed the East and West culture tensions, and the gender expectations during that time.

In 1985, much of her work was transported to China, and collected by the National Art Museum in Beijing and the Anhui Museum in Hefei. Despite being remembered for introducing Western paintings to China, she also provided a new lens to how women were seen through her paintings, not just as objects but as subjects. In her works, she extensively used the female nude, which is unusual and controversial. Later, the scholarship interpreted that this is the way how the Pan assert women's agency and subjectivity in a male-lead art world. She won several awards for her work and exhibited internationally in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Significant paintings, sculptures, and prints by her are still conserved in France in the collection of the Cernuschi museum. Her life as an artist has been portrayed in novels, films, and operas in China and the United States. Her art evolved within the flux of conflicting dichotomies of East and West, tradition and modernity, male chauvinism and emerging feminism. Pan is also remembered as an artist who engaged with labels, such as "contemporary/modern," "Chinese," and "woman" artist, while also questioning them.