Pan Yuliang, Xu Beihong and the Revolution in Chinese Art

If you’re ever privileged enough to witness a revolution, hopefully a peaceful one, one of the things that you’ll see is an explosion of ideas. Everything is up for grabs, nothing is sacred. Of course, the ideas are always there bubbling away under the surface, but the thinkers are afraid of ridicule and the receivers are too wedded to the orthodoxy to give new ideas much consideration.

Art is no exception. My own experience was watching China’s artists in the 1980s after Deng Xiaoping had encouraged them to “liberate their thinking”. Suddenly artists who had been churning out Socialist Realist pictures of workers, peasants and soldiers in heroic stances could do whatever they liked, and they did so in incredible numbers. Socialist Realism remained, but it morphed into the Chinese style, which is almost photographic.

A good example of what happened is a comparison between modern master Chen Yifei’s work before and after Deng’s revolution. His Eulogy to the Yellow River, a painting of a Red Army soldier looking out over a bleak loess landscape, painted in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution, is a competent painting in the Socialist Realist style but it is derivative and lacks feeling. Compare this with his 1991 painting Poppy Flower. This is one of a series of paintings of Tang Dynasty imperial concubines. There were hundreds of imperial concubines in every reign and their lives were of almost uninterrupted boredom. The name of the painting gives a hint of the drug addiction that many of them fell into. The realism is still there but this is a poignant and deeply felt painting.

Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Chinese art experienced a similar revolution. Traditional Chinese art came under revolutionary scrutiny. The editor of the magazine New Youth and China’s first communist, Chen Duxiu, described traditional Chinese ink painting as “repetitious, stale and repetitive”. Xu Beihong, to my mind China’s greatest artist of the early modern period, said that traditional artists were people who “flipped their brushes and splashed their ink, daubing in random abandon without a governing principle”[i].

Everybody was looking to the West. At the same time the West was looking east. Frank Lloyd Wright was designing buildings under the influence of Japanese architecture, Ezra Pound was translating Tang poetry despite knowing no Chinese. French Impressionism was no exception. Matisse summarised it: “La révélation m’est venue de l’Orient.”[ii]

As in so many areas of the new culture in China, the first awakenings of the new art came from Japan. We see it first in traditional art. In 1906 the traditionalist Cantonese artist Gao Jianfu went to Japan, where he was influenced by the Nihonga school. The Nihonga school, whilst combining techniques from many traditional Japanese painting styles, also embraced certain Western concepts such as realism, colour and perspective. Gao returned to Canton and was a founder of the Lingnan school of Chinese traditional art which also adopted Western styles, particularly colour, while still remaining recognisably Chinese.

Japan also featured in education in Western art. Among the thousands of Chinese who studied abroad in the late nineteenth century were many who studied painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. This school, founded in 1887 by Okakura Kakuzo and the Boston orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, taught Western and Japanese painting techniques and was influential in formulating pedagogic methods in China.

After the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, he Ministry of Education placed special emphasis on developing art education. Cai Yuanpei, the former Hanlin scholar who became republican China’s first Minister of Education, urged China to look to Western art. He believed that aesthetic education was a priority in China’s modernisation. China’s greatest early modern author, Lu Xun, who worked in Cai’s Ministry, proposed the establishment of public art galleries and exhibition halls. Cai Yuanpei resigned from his ministry after a dispute with China’s first President Yuan Shikai and went to Germany. On his return to China in 1916, he took up the post of president of Peking University, where he continued to promote Chinese study abroad. A particular interest of Cai’s was the despatch of worker students to France, where many future Chinese communists first met Marx. Cai supported the establishment in 1921 of the Institut Franco-Chinois de Lyon, where many Chinese modernist artists got their start. Cai personally supported several such students financially and gave scholarships to others. Of the first seventeen Chinese students at Lyon, eight were women[iii]. Given the restricted status of women in traditional Chinese society, this is remarkable—all sorts of unexpected things happen in revolutions. Compare this with the French impressionists, where only two women were widely recognised as virtuoso painters and one of them, the American Mary Cassatt, wasn’t French.

The leading Chinese art school of the modern period was the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting, founded in Shanghai in 1912 by Liu Haisu, Wu Shiguang and Zhang Yunguang. The academy was originally dedicated to traditional Chinese painting, but it morphed into the first school in China to teach Western art techniques, and accordingly through several name changes became the Shanghai Academy of Fine Art[iv]. Liu Haisu was only sixteen at the time. Highly precocious, he had studied Western painting under one Zhou Xiang, whose school taught young painters to paint backdrops for the stage.

Liu was a forceful character who painted in the impressionist mode—his force of personality possibly explains his later reputation as an artist. His works are mediocre at best, but his administrative skills were formidable. Many of the greats of early modern Chinese art studied under Liu in Shanghai.

Liu also started the first life drawing classes in China using nude models. Nude painting had existed in traditional China but it had been confined to pornography.[v] Accordingly there was no history of nude modelling, and Liu had great trouble finding models. His first models were boys to whom he had to pay enormous fees. His first female model, in 1920, was a White Russian refugee. No Chinese woman, respectable or otherwise, was available for such a shameful profession.

Nude modelling and nude art kept Liu close to the edges of the law. The academy’s first exhibition including nude pictures (1917) aroused wide condemnation in Shanghai. His closest brush with authority came in 1924 when one of his students held an exhibition in Nanchang in Jiangxi province. The warlord controlling several provinces in East China, Sun Chuanfang, was outraged. He issued an order for Liu’s arrest and tried to close down the academy. Fortunately, the academy was situated in Shanghai’s French concession where Chinese law didn’t apply, and was thus outside the reach of Sun.[vi]

Many of the greats of early modern Chinese art either went through the doors of the Shanghai Academy or were closely associated with it. Let us concentrate on two, Pan Yuliang (1894–1977) and Xu Beihong (1895–1953).

The quality of Pan Yuliang’s art alone would qualify her for study. She was well known in France where she lived for many years but unknown in her own country until a large number of her works were repatriated in the 1980s. Now she is recognised as a great and her works sell for millions of yuan. The circumstances of her life add particular interest. Social revolutions often mean that opportunities arise for people in the lower strata of society, or even on its edges, and Pan Yuliang started life as a prostitute.

Pan Yuliang was born on June 14, 1894, in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, as Chen Xiuqing. Her father died when she was one year old and with the death of her mother in 1903 an uncle took her in and her name became Zhang Yuliang (Zhang was her uncle’s surname). She appears to have been a beautiful girl; the uncle saw this as a money-making opportunity and sold her to a brothel called “Joyous Spring Garden” in Wuhu County, Anhui Province.

There she remained until 1912. That year, a new customs supervisor, Pan Zanhua, took up his post (Wuhu was a treaty port on the Yangtze River). The local government and chamber of commerce held a welcome dinner for Pan at the “Joyous Spring Garden”. The head of the chamber of commerce, who was obviously familiar with Zhang Yuliang, called on her to play the pipa and sing songs for the guest of honour.

Pan was captivated by her. What happened next depends on where your source lies on the romance-to-reality continuum. Most likely he became her regular customer and lover. Eventually, Pan bought her contract and she was free. In 1912 or 1913 they went through a form of marriage whereby Pan took her as his secondary wife (Pan, who was ten years her elder, already had a wife). Pan was a member of revolutionary societies, particularly the Tongmeng Hui, and it is interesting to note that the sole witness[vii] at this ceremony was Chen Duxiu, later editor of New Youth, leader of the New Thought Movement and founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Chen continued to appear in Pan Yuliang’s life at irregular intervals.

For the next few years the couple travelled round China. Pan Zanhua was well placed in the revolutionary movement and had several official positions, including in Beijing where they lived for several years. If we are to believe some of the more romanticised versions of their story, at their first meeting in the brothel she had sung a song to Pan based on a poem about a Tang Dynasty prostitute and Pan was impressed at how much this illiterate woman knew about Tang culture. While they were in Beijing, Pan Yuliang learnt to read and write.

In 1917 the couple moved to Shanghai. Living next door to them was Hong Ye, a noted painter and teacher at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Art. He took an interest in her sketching—she was clearly talented—and began to teach her the fundamentals of painting. She blossomed. Chen Duxiu also saw her talent and together with Hong Ye, introduced her to Liu Haisu, the Head of the Shanghai Academy[viii]. Liu encouraged her to sit the entrance examination of the academy and in 1920 she was admitted. It was at this time that she changed her name. Liu was conscious of the possibility of problems arising from admitting not only a woman but an ex-prostitute and a current concubine. He encouraged her to change her name from Zhang to her husband’s Pan[ix]. Doing so would suggest that she was not Pan Zanhua’s concubine but his da taitai, principal wife. This she readily did. She remained grateful throughout her life to Pan for saving her from a life of prostitution.

Several Chinese sources say that in 1921 Pan Yuliang joined the Communist Party. There is no direct evidence of this but given her close association with Party founder Chan Duxiu, it seems likely. Certainly she was strongly political and leftish in her views, although various twists in internal communist policy meant that politics prevented her from living in China under the communists.

Life seemed good. Pan Zanhua moved his first wife, Fang Shanyu, to live with them in Shanghai and Fang gave birth to a son, Pan Mou, who Pan Yuliang treated like her own son. Pan Yuliang studied Western painting under Wang Jiyuan and took part in en plein air classes. She had one problem. The academy was the first school in China to offer life drawing classes. This was controversial in Shanghai, and initially it had been considered improper for a young woman to attend such classes. Pan Yuliang was determined to be do life drawing and took matters into her own hands. The only options available to her were drawing her own nude body from a mirror, something which she continued to do for the rest of her life, or to sketch random women in public bath houses. It caused a stir when the patrons of the bath houses caught sight of an equally naked woman in a corner sketching them, and she was banned from many public bath houses. When Liu Haisu heard of her exclusion from life drawing, he immediately took steps to have her included[x].

Liu was right to be concerned. At an evening gathering of students during a field trip to the ancient capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, Hangzhou, Pan Yuliang exhibited a skill at singing which several of her fellow students didn’t consider ladylike. Inquiries were made into her background and gossip about her past started to spread[xi]. This became a problem to the extent that it threatened to split the school and Liu Haisu had no option but to ask her to withdraw[xii].

But Liu Haisu didn’t abandon her. Within the same month she received an invitation and a scholarship to the Institut Franco-Chinois at Lyon. In August 1921 she set sail for France and arrived in Lyon in September. There she enrolled under the name Pan Yu-lin, the name by which she was to be known in France until her death, and gave her marital status as single which, by French standards, she was.

According to her friend Su Xuelin, she spent the next year learning French, and became quite fluent.[xiii] In June 1924 she was accepted into the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. It was here that she first became close to Xu Beihong, one of the true greats of early modern Chinese art. Xu Beihong was also a Jiangsu native, son of a private school teacher who first taught him to paint. His path to art education was much smoother than Pan Yuliang’s. In 1915 at the age of twenty he went to Shanghai where he learnt French at the Jesuit Aurora University, and from there progressed to art school in Tokyo. He went back to China in 1917 and taught art at Peking University. The president of Peking University was Cai Yuanpei, sponsor of many Chinese art students and patron and supporter of overseas study. In 1919 Xu won a scholarship, also to the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Pan Yuliang and Xu Beihong both studied under Lucien Simon and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. Simon and Dagnan-Bouveret had the reputation of being academic traditionalists, but the paths taken by their two Chinese students couldn’t have been more different. Despite her classical training in Paris, Pan Yuliang’s subsequent output owed much to impressionism and Fauvism. Xu Beihong, on the other hand, leant to academic classicism for the rest of his career—I am speaking of his Western-style paintings, not his wonderful Chinese ink paintings of which his horses and depictions of the Li River in Guilin are best known. Xu’s many nude sketches are pure academy, simple lines, true depictions. In this context I should mention that during this period, in Tokyo, Beijing and Paris, Xu kept a sketchbook, all in academic-style sepia watercolours, which have now been collected and published[xiv]. I’m fascinated at how lively they are. If you look at the photography of the period, it seems to be imitating painting in terms of composition, and yet in Xu’s sketch books it’s the opposite. Xu’s composition captures movement and angles which seem to foresee the unposed, unrehearsed photography of a later period.

When we look at what happened to Pan and Xu after their graduation from Paris, the paths could not have diverged further. Of these two highly talented, hard-working artists, Xu goes from success to success whereas Pan’s life continues through challenge. If anybody during this period of Chinese history could be said to have had a dream run, it would be Xu Beihong. On his return to China in 1927 he took up a post as Dean of Painting at Central University in Nanjing. He travelled throughout Europe promoting Chinese art through multiple exhibitions. When war broke out with Japan, he was in Singapore and Malaya. His contribution to the war effort was solo exhibitions in those areas with proceeds being donated to war funds. When the Japanese came through Malaya he went to India and continued his work there. Even his early death from a stroke in 1953 was, in a sense, fortunate. With communist control after 1949, Xu became head of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and chairman of the China Artists’ Association, the body in which all Chinese artists were corralled and which controlled their art. It is difficult to imagine somebody of Xu’s background and temperament being safe from the swings of Chinese communist policy, and I doubt if he would have made it through the anti-rightist campaigns of 1956 and 1957. Liu Haisu, despite his connections with the communists, did not. But in that capacity Xu made a great contribution in setting technical (as opposed to political) policy in the Chinese art academies during the post-1949 period. I believe we are all richer for that today as Chinese art takes the world by storm.

Pan Yuliang’s path was much more difficult. She performed brilliantly at school to the extent that she won an Italian government scholarship of 5000 lire to study at the Accademia Regia di Belle Arti in Rome. While in Rome she painted prodigiously, producing some of her best work including White Chrysanthemums, which was exhibited at the Nanjing Education Ministry Exhibition in that year. She also won a gold medal at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte in Rome in 1926 and won a gold medal[xv]. But not everything went smoothly for her. She had asked some fellow students from the Institut Franco-Chinois at Lyon to ship a number of her paintings back to China for her, but a fire in the hold of the ship destroyed them entirely[xvi].

She also had moments of fortune. While walking through the Vatican Galleries, she ran into her mentor at the Shanghai Academy, Liu Haisu, who had an offer for her. In 1928, she returned to Shanghai as Dean of Western Painting at her old school, Liu’s Shanghai Academy. She had been a controversial figure at the academy in her student days and, sadly, this was to continue.

Things started well. On her arrival in Shanghai, many of the teachers of the academy including her mentors Wang Jiyuan and Hong Ye were at the dockside to greet her. The school held a one-person exhibition for her, naming her “China’s first female Western-style painter”.

But seven years of absence had not been enough to put gossip to bed. And where there is gossip, there is usually speculation. In her case, the speculation revolved around the impossibility of a woman, especially a prostitute and concubine, producing work of such quality. It was widely bruited around that she had paid money to her mentor and friend Hong Ye, who was the real author of her works. This logic was loosely based on fact. Hong Ye had been seriously ill with tuberculosis and his children were unemployed. Pan Yuliang felt that she owed him. Pan Zanhua had a steady government job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Mines in Nanjing so she didn’t depend on her academy salary to live, and every month she sent half of her salary to Hong Ye. But the work was all her own.

Matters came to a head during a press conference at the opening of an exhibition. In front of a crowd, a reporter accused her of fraud, of having her paintings done by Hong Ye. The crowd fell silent. Pan borrowed a canvas, paints and brushes from a student in the room and, from her reflection in a window, painted her own portrait. [xvii]

This put those accusations to bed. The opinions of non-experts like the reporter didn’t worry Pan, but those of her peers at the academy did. Suspicions about the real authorship of her works were even raised at staff meetings—it was clear that several of the professors who had ambitions of promotion resented being passed over by an outsider. In one meeting, one professor expressed what appeared to be the opinion of many, that power in the faculty lay in the hands of a prostitute. Pan Yuliang slapped the offender’s face hard[xviii].

This made her position at the academy untenable. She wrote two letters of resignation, one to Liu Haisu, who was in Venice at the time, and one to Wang Jiyuan, who was temporary head of the academy.[xix]

She also wrote to Xu Beihong. Xu at this time was Head of Painting at Central University in Nanjing. While holding down her job as Dean in the Shanghai Academy, Pan Yuliang had also been shuttling between Shanghai and Nanjing 300 kilometres away. Her motives had been mixed—her husband, Pan Zanhua, lived and worked there in the Nanjing government, but she also took painting classes at Central University for Xu Beihong. Working for Liu and Xu at the same time wasn’t something that she could do openly. The rivalry between Liu Haisu and Xu Beihong during the 1930s was bitter and when, after the communist takeover, both took the communist shilling and worked for the Ministry of Culture, relations between the two were so bad that Zhou Enlai himself stepped in as mediator.

Now she was able to work full-time with Xu and live with her family.[xx] This was possibly the most settled time of Pan’s life. She taught in several institutions, including painting at Central University and sculpture at Xinhua Art College. She became a founder member of the Chinese Art Society. She painted some of her best work, including My Family (1932) which depicts her as a small, bespectacled, rather bemused-looking figure against a background of her husband and son dressed, as befits KMT government officials, in their Sun Yat-sen suits.

She participated in several exhibitions. One is of particular interest to us—in October 1935, the KMT official newspaper, the Central Daily, reported that the Ministry of Education had sent several of Pan’s works to an international exhibition in Australia.[xxi] We have been unable to find any evidence of any such exhibition in Australia at that time. Was the exhibition in Austria? Austria and Australia are equally as easily confused in Chinese as they are in English.

Her final exhibition in Nanjing presaged trouble to come. On January 28, 1935, she held a big exhibition of her work. The painting which attracted most attention was called Power of Mankind, a large work depicting an enormous nude male pushing a giant stone over crushed grass. Next morning when she opened the doors, she was shocked to find that the exhibition had been trashed. Her big canvas had been slashed with a knife and upon it were scrawled the words “A whore’s paean to her customer”. It is tempting to put this all down to the rumours about Pan’s past, but there were other factors at play. This was at the height of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life Movement” opposing all signs of degeneracy and it seems possible that Chiang’s Blue Shirts may have been involved here. The Blue Shirts were Chiang’s morality enforcers, based on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. This would not have been the first time that the Blue Shirts interrupted events which offended Chiang’s chaste new society.

It is also worthy of note that Chen Duxiu also makes an appearance in Pan’s life here. In 1935, Pan did a portrait of Chen Duxiu. By that time, Chen was no longer a communist—he had been expelled from the party for supposed Trotskyism. This did not bring him favour in Chiang Kai-shek’s eyes—Chen was in a KMT prison from which he wrote essays praising liberal democracy. A mere painting of Chen would be enough to bring Pan Yuliang to the notice of Chiang’s people.

Some sources suggest that this event coincided with a deterioration in relations between Pan Zanhua’s wives. Complex rules governed relationships between wives in China’s hierarchical and polygamous society, and Pan Yuliang was a forceful and outspoken personality.

In any case, whatever the mix of motivations, on July 25, 1937, she sailed for Vladivostok from where she took the train to Paris. She intended to stay only a couple of years in France, but war and politics intervened. She established herself in Montparnasse and painted, sculpted and exhibited prodigiously. It was during this period that she started to experiment with combining Western oil and Chinese ink painting techniques.

It is unclear how she spent the war years. Her Chinese biographer suggests that when the Germans entered Paris, she took refuge in the countryside and made a living by teaching embroidery. He also suggests that in 1942 she went to the Soviet Union where she was well received and returned to Paris in 1943[xxii]. How she would have achieved this politically and personally dangerous voyage is not explained and we will pass over it.

She became well known not only among Chinese artists in Paris, but throughout the French art world. In 1945, she was unanimously elected as head of the Association des Artistes Chinois en France. In 1955, when cinematographer Jean-Claude Bernard made a documentary, Chez Ceux de Montparnasse, about the artists of Montparnasse, Pan and a Japanese artist were the only non-European faces in it.[xxiii]

From a personal perspective, among the Chinese artistic community in Paris, Pan Yuliang was known as the “woman of the three don’ts”: don’t fall in love, don’t take foreign citizenship and don’t contract yourself to any one gallery.

The first was problematic. Despite being dedicated to Pan and her family, she was separated from them by thousands of miles. After the communist takeover, Pan Zanhua, as a senior KMT government official and a close friend of the “Trotskyist” Chen Duxiu, fell into political disfavour and financial difficulties. Pan Yuliang sent them money. Pan Zanhua was in regular contact with her by mail throughout much of her time in Paris and on several occasions asked her to come back. Her family listed seven times when she attempted unsuccessfully to repatriate. Various events intervened. In the late 1950s, as she was making plans to return, she learnt that her former director at the Shanghai Academy, Liu Haisu, had been declared a rightist. He had been condemned for refusing to move the East China Arts Academy from Nanjing to Xi’an as ordered by the State Council. Pan Yuliang felt that with her close association with Liu, the time was not right for a return. On another occasion, as she was preparing to ship her works to China, the French authorities declared them part of the French patrimony and refused their export.

In 1959, Pan Zanhua died. Pan Yuliang didn’t get to hear of this until a year later (some sources say until 1964). By 1964 she was well enough regarded by Chinese officialdom to be invited to the first National Day reception at the Chinese Embassy in Paris after the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France. She made plans to go back and invited Pan Zanhua’s grandson to help her prepare her works[xxiv]. But then the Cultural Revolution intervened.

Her third “don’t”, not to contract oneself to a single gallery, meant that her artistic integrity remained intact, but her financial situation began to deteriorate. Eventually she became financially dependent upon Wang Shouyi, a man who she had known since the 1930s, and they lived together. Wang had come to Paris as a worker during the First World War and had worked with Deng Xiaoping who asked to meet him when he made his first official visit to France. Whether Pan and Wang became lovers is a matter of speculation.

Pan Yuliang died in 1977 and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. The passage of years and politics meant that in her native land she was now little known. Even in France she was better known for her sculpture than her painting: the institutions in France that keep her sculptures are ones which specialise in Oriental art.

It had been Pan Yuliang’s wish as expressed to Wang Shouyi that her enormous body of art works should be sent to China and donated to the art gallery of Anhui, the home province of Pan Zanhua. Wang Shouyi, emphasising his connections with Deng Xiaoping, deposited them in the Chinese Embassy in Paris for safe keeping and then died suddenly. He was buried in the same grave as Pan Yuliang.

There her works stayed until 1982 when one of her former students, Yu Feng, on a visit to France, discovered her works in the basement of the embassy: “thousands of wonderful works stacked randomly in the shabby basement”. Yu Feng submitted a report to the Ministry of Culture and in 1985 an expert group was sent to Paris to retrieve the works. Most were sent to the Anhui Provincial Gallery in Hefei[xxv].

Suddenly Pan Yuliang was famous in her own land again. The auction prices of her paintings soared. In its annual Hong Kong sales of Chinese art, Christies reported sales of individual paintings in 2010 at HK$2.5 million (A$450,000), in 2014 at HK$ 5.4 million (A$1million) and in 2019 at HK$11.9 million (A$2.2 million)[xxvi]. Pan Yuliang was hot!

Her romantic story quickly went into popular culture, where it was widely embellished. In 1988, Fujian Provincial Television brought out an eight-part series dramatising her life. In 1994, the movie based (very loosely) on her life, A Soul Haunted by Art, came out. The film, which starred Gong Li, was panned. Critics described a scene where she used her own body as a nude model as “a cheap trick in a dull film”.

But film wasn’t the only place where a sketchy story needed to be livened up. Feminists picked over Pan Yuliang’s bones in a hunt for signs of sisterliness and general wokeness. One commentary contrasts Pan’s Black and White Contrast, a painting of a black and a white woman sitting together in “gentle, relaxed and amiable … Sisterhood” with the “subordinated presence of the black servant” in Manet’s Olympia. Manet, it appears, committed the secular sin of subordinating the black to the white because his “orientalist aesthetics is formulated upon European’s [sic] relations with Islamic North Africa[xxvii]”. Reality takes us in different directions. The black model in many of Pan’s paintings is Anais, the adopted daughter of Pan’s concierge—she had been liberated from Islamic slavery in North Africa. Pan employed her as a model and a servant for many years. Make what you will of that. Yes, Pan was a radical, but she was also a strong-minded individual. We can only try to imagine the scorn with which she would have greeted attempts to force her into ideological boxes.

[i] Lynn Pan, Shanghai Style, Art and Design in China between the Wars, Joint Publishing (HK) Company, Hong Kong 2008

[ii] Roderick Conway Morris “The Sources of Matisse’s Style: an Oriental Revelation” New York Times, 29 November 1997

[iii] Wang Yiyan Art and Chinese Modernity in Connection with Lyon, 1920s-1940s https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/512 accessed 26 November 2019

[iv]刘海粟纪念网站https://liuhaisu.artron.net/ accessed 28 November 2019

[v] Robert van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, Privately published, Tokyo 1951

[vi] 中国裸莫特历史， 人民日报 29 August 2012

[vii] Zhou Zhaokan, 潘玉良美术作品精选， Sichuan Art Publications 2011

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid,

[x] Ibid

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Dong Song 潘玉良艺术年谱， Anhui Art Publications 2013

[xiii] Su Xuelin 七十年前女强人潘玉良的悲剧 in 中外杂志 August 1991

[xiv] 徐悲鸿往事

[xv] PAN YU-LIN 大事年表http://www.panyulin.org/chronology.php?lang=tw  accessed 28 November 2019

[xvi] PAN YU-LIN 大事年表http://www.panyulin.org/chronology.php?lang=tw  accessed 28 November 2019

[xvii]中国女梵高潘玉良：却一生背负妓女耻辱http://www.xuanlishi.com/lishirenwu/201801/1685_2.shtml accessed 22 November 2019

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid

[xxi] “潘玉良女画师将漫游全国写生名生大川“ Central Daily 18 October 1935潘玉良女畫師將漫遊全國

[xxii] Dong Song 潘玉良艺术年谱， Anhui Art Publications 2013

[xxiii] 中国女梵高潘玉良：却一生背负妓女耻辱http://www.xuanlishi.com/lishirenwu/201801/1685_2.shtml accessed 29 November 2019

[xxiv] https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/fedora_extracted/45815.pdf accessed 29 November 2019

[xxv] China Daily 31 May 2002

[xxvi] https://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=6209567 accessed 29 November 2019

[xxvii] Phyllis Teo, Modernism and Orientalism: The Ambiguous Nudes of Chinese Artist Pan Yuliang, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, December 2010