In conversations about Chinese women artists of the 20th century, Pan Yu-Lin is a name that invariably crops up. She was in the first cohort of female graduates from the Shanghai Art Academy, and later traveled to France and Italy for further training during the 1920s. Yet, although a respected artist and educator, outside of artistic circles, her artworks tested the limits of social and cultural acceptability in China, while in Europe, she struggled to be seen beyond the lens of Orientalism. At Asia Society’s “Song of Spring: Pan Yu-Lin in Paris,” one could see how the artist continuously sought to strike a balance between Western and Eastern styles of representation, which would allow her to authentically portray her experience as a Chinese woman abroad. 

It is easy to dismiss Pan’s early oil paintings, presented in the first section of the exhibition, as derivative of Fauvism, Post-Impressionism, and all the -isms that she would have come across in France. Sweet Dream (1940) harkens back to the motif of the reclining nude—a tradition that became increasingly distasteful towards the turn of the century, when Western primitivists began to draw inspiration from the colonies, one-upping each other in the degrading ways that they could depict their exotic subjects. Consider Gauguin’s 1892 Spirit of the Dead Watching, where the “primitive” girl is depicted with an utter disregard for the modesty that would have been expected of a Western woman, followed by Matisse’s Blue Nude in 1907, where he exaggerates the figure’s sexuality to the point of monstrosity. Pan’s Sweet Dream shows a Chinese woman in the bold, orangey hues of the Fauves, in a similar position as the African subject of Matisse’s Blue Nude. The female figure is submissive as ever, with her eyes shut, and open body language. The bed tilts in a way so it appears that, at any moment, she may slide into the viewer’s space. There is one shocking element: her underarm hair remains untrimmed, going against the ideal of a woman with no “objectionable” body hair. Therein lies a hint of the direction that Pan would take with her later ink and color works, where she begins to explore the female form as it is, casting off the traditions and expectations built by the male gaze.