Western style painters should make a self-conscious return to Chinese culture by reading more books. Unlike our ancestors, people in modern society rarely dedicate their time to reading. How many contemporary elites have more than 1000 books in their household? —Pang Jiun

Born in Shanghai in 1936, Pang Jiun is an artist from Changshu, Jiangsu. He transferred to the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1942, and held an exhibition at the Guangzhou Provincial Library in 1948. In 1949, he enrolled at the Hangzhou College of Art (which later became the East-China Campus of Central Academy of Fine Arts and currently renamed China Academy of Art) to learn from art masters including Lin Fengmian, Pan Tianshou, Huang Binhong, Ni Yide, and Yan Wenliang. In addition, Pang also became one of the last disciples of Xu Beihong. In 1954, Pang graduated with outstanding grades at the young age of 18, setting a new record for being the “youngest college graduate.” Pang launched his professional art career between 1954 and 1980, during which he worked on a creative team at Beijing Art Academy, taught oil painting at Beijing Fine Art Academy, and served a part-time associate professor at the Stage Design Department of the Central Academy of Drama. He moved to Hong Kong in 1980 to teach sketching before finally migrating to Taiwan in 1987. For more than twenty years, he has been a professor at National Taiwan University of Arts and fully dedicated himself to the pursuit of art creation.

Pang started learning oil painting and receiving systematic, formal art education when he was 11 years old. It was without question that Pang would become a painter considering his background and long years of cultivation from an artistic family. Both of Pang’s parents were famous first-generation oil painters–his father Pang Xunqin was a contemporary art pioneer, industrial artist, and renowned painter who studied in Paris, and his mother Qiu Ti had also studied in Tokyo. Pang’s greatest art achievement is in inventing his style of oriental oil painting. His work features Expressionist oriental oil paintings that combine the passion and power of Western Post-Impressionism and Fauvism with the implicit gentleness of Eastern literati paintings and poetry.

By delving into classic and contemporary art, Pang ingeniously blended Eastern ink wash and literati paintings with the language of Western oil paintings to form a one-of-a-kind art style that critics called “freehand oil paintings.” In the still portrait Romantic Lily, the artist applied “freehand” theories to practice: painting the lily petals in bright colors and moving the paintbrush at varying speeds and forces to produce thickly textured layers of oil paints. In fact, the artist tried to enhance pure colors through a two-dimensional plane. In other words, the “planar” approach added greater depth to the painting, followed by using color combinations to create a sense of spatiality that simplifies the shapes randomly. The exotic water bottle on the blue background and violet tablecloth are painted with Fauvism, Impressionist techniques that naturally display the sense of originality from human innocence and naivety.