Negotiating the Discourse of the Modern in Art: Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) and the Transnational Modern.

Abstract

This dissertation offers a critical reassessment of Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) and her works. Although scholarship on Pan Yuliang has proliferated in past decades, it has focused on a review of her works, her status as a woman artist, and a revised assessment of her contribution to the legacy of modern art in China during the twentieth century.

By situating her work within the international cultural politics of the mid-twentieth century, the dissertation recasts her works as media through which she negotiated both race and gender, and shows how the binary “East” and “West,” ubiquitous in the critical writings of the period, reveals the dynamics at play in Chinese modernism, not only in the past but right up to the present. The dissertation focuses on a range of historical moments, culling primary source material from Pan’s participation in the 1929 National Exhibition of Art and then on to her participation in French exhibitions after she left China in 1937. Several chapters examine her most representative subject matter, the female nude, situating her treatment of the subject in relation to the discourse of the New Woman in early twentieth-century China, as well as considering how she adapted to the discourse of the Chinese Other in a transnational context.