DRAWING INFLUENCES
Oil painter Pang Tao has aided the modernization of Chinese art over the past 40 years, Lin Qi reports.
It can become a lifelong battle for some when they are born in families of eminent artists and have to not just take the legacies forward but also make their own mark.
But that has not been a problem for 84-year-old Pang Tao, who has inherited an innovative spirit to incorporate cultural traditions into modern art. She has also developed a distinct art vocabulary.
In 1956, her father, Pang Xunqin, who was a painter and graphic designer, co-founded the Central Academy of Arts and Design that later became Tsinghua University’s arts and design department. Her mother, Qiu Di, studied in Japan and was among China’s first generation of female oil painters emerging in the early 20th century.
Pang Tao’s artistic evolution epitomizes the modernization of Chinese art since the 20th century, heralded by her parents and their peers. The process began with the introduction of Western art and then was dominated by a realistic approach under the influence of Russian art. But it gradually diversified in style as China launched its reform and opening-up in 1978.
The ongoing exhibition, Dancing Notes, at Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum gives viewers a glimpse of both Pang Tao’s individual progress in painting — dozens of her works dating from the 1940s to more recent years are on show — and the country’s changes in artistic orientation. The display runs through Nov 11.
Pang Tao’s career began after her graduation from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the 1950s. She worked as a teacher there until her retirement in 1989.
Her 93-year-old husband, Lin Gang, who retired from the same school, used to teach oil painting.
But her talent as an artist was spotted in childhood. She was 4 years old when she won a prize at a national children’s painting competition. At age 13, she held her first exhibition with her younger brother, Pang Jun, in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. A year later, they again exhibited works together at a gallery in Shanghai.
Two still lifes that Pang Tao painted in her teens are being shown at Dancing Notes, from which one can recognize a natural painter with a sense of color.
Besides good artistic taste, more importantly, Pang Tao’s parents implanted in her a disposition to improve through change.
In the late 1920s, Pang Xunqin attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, an art school well known for leading students to break away from strict academic conventions and think independently and create freely. He co-founded Juelan She, a vanguard art society in Shanghai, in 1932. Members sought to revive Chinese art by developing oil painting.
Qiu joined after returning from Japan a year later.
Pang Tao’s attempts with abstraction did not fully take off until the 1980s, when Chinese art circles started to shift from socialist realism to a variety of contemporary approaches.
Lu Yinghua, director of the Inside-Out Art Museum, says Pang Tao is an “outstanding artist of her generation” — her explorations in the 1980s led to changes in the composition, color schemes and mediums of Chinese art.
Pang Tao’s reinterpretations of natural landscapes freed the audience from the established viewing of familiar scenery, providing imaginative experiences. For example, her works in the early 1980s depict Xiangbi Mountain, a landmark riverside attraction in Guilin in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, which is named for its physical resemblance of an elephant’s trunk. She skips detailing the landscape that surrounds the mountain and highlights its geometrical structure and rough texture by adding sand to the oil paint.
Some of these works are on show in a series titled Travels
Another shown painting created in 1986, titled Treasure, depicts a gold circle against a vast black background.
“People ask what the circle stands for,” Pang Tao says. “It can be viewed as a metaphor for the glitter that indicates treasures buried deep.”
There is no need to identify a specific object in abstract paintings, she adds.
“It is like the feeling of a thunderstorm, say, through music, without having to actually see or hear a real storm.”
Her endeavors extended to modernizing visual elements of ancient culture. The bronze ware of the Shang (c.16th century-11th century BC) and Zhou (c. 11th century-256 BC) dynasties are two examples. She became interested in the intricate patterns on the archaic items in the late 1930s, when her father began categorizing traditional Chinese patterns for his own work and publication.
Pang Tao was in the middle of a yearlong stay in Paris as a visiting scholar when Pang Xunqin died in 1985. The exposure to the diversity of Western art ignited her thinking on how to adapt traditional Chinese culture to a modern context. And while remembering her father, she was drawn to the bronze ware that he’d invested much energy in researching.
Her Revelation of Bronze series of paintings, also on display at the ongoing exhibition, shows the addition of vibrant colors to render a rhythmic touch.
In many of Pang Tao’s works, including the Change of Color Graduation series she created last year, rhythm is a rule for her while arranging shapes, lines and colors in harmony.
The Dancing Notes exhibition also displays her old recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions. She says her father, Pang Xunqin, used to buy a lot of CDs.
“At times, our father asked my brother and me to sit down and do nothing but listen to Bach’s music,” she recalls. “Our mother wondered if we understood. But our father said that, if we kept listening, we would.”
Pang Tao says abstract art and music are alike because the lines and spaces are like the “notes and dots that correspond”. Abstract art was introduced to China from the West, and Pang says what she produces are “post-abstract” works. Rather than simply copying a Western model, she creates to enliven her home culture.