Pang Xunqin

Pang was born in Jiangsu to a landlord family. Demonstrating an inclination towards color and design at a young age, he started learning about the traditional Chinese painting of flowers at eleven. He studied medicine in Shanghai from 1921 to 1924 after being told by a foreign priest that the Chinese could never become great artists. In September 1925, Pang moved to Paris to study oil painting at the Académie Julian at the age of 19, following fellow patriots such as Xu Beihong. At the time, Paris was at the epicenter of newfound artistic trends, from Cubism to Fauvism, and was flocked to by foreign artists. Pang spent over a year at the Académie Julian learning technical skills through live sketching, and receiving critiques from teachers at the prestigious École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Influenced heavily by fellow artist Chang Yu, Pang followed Chang's advice not to enter the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts after his time at the Académie Julian. He began using Chinese ink brushes to sketch after observing Chang using the same technique. This technique supported Pang's desire to meld European modernism with traditional Chinese sketch conceptualism, in spite of many of his contemporaries resurrecting the Chinese tradition as an alternative to modernism. Most of Pang's work at the time was portraiture, self or otherwise.

Pang returned to China in 1930 to a divided nation that valued European academic realism over modernism. He returned to his hometown to study book on Chinese art history and theory, finding it difficult to return to a country which he had spent the past five years in no contact with. Pang held numerous solo exhibitions and, with Chang Ta-chien, founded the Tai-mong Association and later the Storm Society. Pang wedded female artist Qiu Ti in 1932. During wars in the 1930s to early 1940s, Pang was forced to move frequently, all the while teaching and painting. In 1936, after the disbandment of the Storm Society, he taught at the Beiping Art Academy. He founded the Central College of Arts and Crafts in 1953, China's first arts and crafts institute. However, as a result of the Cultural Revolution, Pang was banned from teaching during China's Anti-Rightist Campaign, being forced into retirement in 1972. He spent the next two decades painting brightly colored still lifes and writing Studies on Chinese Decorative Paintings of the Previous Dynasties, which would be published in 1982. Pang was reinstated as a teacher in 1979 and his later academic research focused on Chinese traditional crafts and decoration. He had been impressed deeply by women in the rural mountains' ability to create beautiful patterns and motifs from only their imaginations. In 1984, he completed his memoir, which was published by San-Lian Press that year. He died in Beijing in 1985 from complications of gastric cancer. The Pang Xunqin Memorial Arts Museum was founded in 1991 in his hometown, where almost five hundred paintings are exhibited.