Pan Yuliang The Impossible Nude Analysis

Pan Yuliang: The Impossible Nude?

Introduction

The study of the Chinese nude has been hindered by an illusion of absence. In their focus on dynastic pictorial art, works such as Francois Jullien’s The Impossible Nude and John Hay’s The Body Invisible in Chinese Art obscure the nude in modern Chinese art. Considering the nude to be impossible has led us to ignore an important historical moment in early twentieth century history, and added to the impression that Chinese culture is unchanging. Reframing the nude is crucial because the conception of its absence is hinged upon a problematic binary between the East and West. This division disregards the bilateral capacity of cultural osmosis and the possibility of internal-local variance. While

both The Impossible Nude and The Body Invisible constitute important interdisciplinary texts and are useful foundations for studying the history of the nude in China, they do not help to understand modern Chinese artists who did work within this genre.
Another issue when studying the nude is the risk of fetishisation. In her work on English and American missionaries who organised resistance to foot binding in Treaty Ports, Angela Zito has suggested that by placing such emphasis on the foot, they turned it into a synecdoche. So concerned with the physical entity of the foot, they ignored the larger themes of gender, power dynamics, and the physical process of ritual. Similarly, the body portrayed in the nude must be conceptualised within the nude tradition and attitudes towards it. A focus on one artist functions to avoid the detachment of the body from society and person, encouraging awareness of aesthetic theory associated with the nude, reception, and artistic technique.
Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) represents an illuminating example of a Chinese artist working on the nude. An ex-concubine among the first female students to study at the Shanghai Art Academy and attend Liu Haisu’s controversial life drawing classes, her artistic development corresponds with the history of the nude in China and her life encapsulates the polemic nature of the genre. Pan went on to study and eventually live in Paris; her work and life also open up various questions concerning the broader themes of globalisation, ethnicity, and cultural osmosis. However, a study of Pan Yuliang inherits a set of distinct problems. The lack of academic material dealing with her necessitates a different approach. Many of the existing surveys are newspaper and magazine articles and exhibition catalogues which, while enlightening, are not created with the intention of theoretical or aesthetic analysis. A further problem lies within the discourse that has emerged in popular and academic culture concerning the artist herself. In recent years her life story has been adapted in popular culture on screen and in print. In 2009 the novelist Jenifer Cody Epstein published The Painter from Shanghai based on Pan Yuliang. Other popular portrayals include Shuqin Hunag’s 1994 film A Soul Haunted by Painting (Hua Hun) starring Gong Li as Pan, and the 1988 eight-part film special on her life produced by the Fujian Provincial Television Studio. The portrayal of Pan as a tragic romanticised heroine in film and fiction has also penetrated other types of analysis; over- romanticization and over-reading of her work to fit the caricature of a concubine saved by love, only to lead a lonely life in a foreign country, has dominated academic representation and reception.
Consequently, when presented with her work outside the context of this romanticised tradition, it comes as a surprise to find it far from enacting this tragic narrative.

In fact little of her work alludes to her personal life and that which does is rarely mournful or romantic. For example, Pan’s Nude by a Window (1946) is a self-portrait which depicts Pan staring at a photograph of her husband Pan Zanhua. The 2006 Christie’s auction catalogue for this piece comments that “the relaxed yet elegant pose of the subject, the painting’s thoughtful mood, and her longing gaze at the photo beside her all contribute to a sense of the loneliness of a creative artist in a foreign land.” While the richly woven layering and vivid coloration of the furnishings, both typical of her style in the 1940s, highlights by contrast the softness of the human form, insinuation of loneliness is an over-reading. The posed, angular shape of the body and its dominance despite the weight of the background suggest an evocation of strength, rather than weakness, mindfulness rather than nostalgia. The nude form has a cogency lacking in the simplistic depiction of the flowers and furnishings, the glowing green tone applied to the left side of the body, reflecting the vibrant green of the chair, serves to accentuate female form from the point of the pedicured foot to the stiff extension of the arms. Because she appears to be performing, the gaze is shifted; she is not gazing at the photograph, rather she is posing for the simultaneous gaze of the audience and the man pictured. Overall, Nude by a Window is far from depicting a woman made frail by passion or sorrow. Though does raise interesting questions about the male

gaze.
To reach a fuller understanding of Pan Yuliang’s oeuvre, the misconceptions surrounding both the nude in China and the character of Pan Yuliang must be reconceptualised. Here, the approach will be to divide this challenge into two distinct but complementary sections. The first of which, ‘The Body’, will address the fallacy of the absent nude through analysis of crucial theoretical texts and challenge the East-West binary, with a particular focus on Shanghai, where Pan Yuliang lived and studied during her last years in China. This commitment to a general theoretical exploration of the nude lies in the conviction that Pan’s work is situated within the recent history of the nude in Chinese art, and the wider tradition in Western art. In reconciling these two aesthetic traditions, which had a simultaneous presence on her work, Pan is presented not under the misleading umbrella of a Chinese artist working within a Western genre, but rather as a more complex manifestation of two interlinking, non-exclusive, cultures at a specific moment in time. The second section, ‘A Body’, will then look in greater depth at the work, life and reception of Pan Yuliang. This dual approach works to prevent an atomized study of a particular artist while also grounding theoretical exploration in image. It constitutes an attempt at an expanded analysis of Pan’s work while also situating her within a broader range of general issues concerning gender, aesthetic osmosis, representation, and reception of the body.