After he arrived Paris in 1921, Sanyu was in no hurry to try his hand on oil painting. Instead, he first focused on sketching people, employing a variety of media ranging from pencil and charcoal to ink and wash drawings, as well as occasional watercolors. It was not before the late 1920s that he began to produce his first oil paintings. At the same time the artist became thoroughly immersed in the postwar spirit of 'les années folles,' or the Roaring Twenties, which proved to be an exhilarating blend of decadence and fresh ideas, bohemianism and new departures. Paris, particularly the Montparnasse district, attracted the crème de la crème of international artists and writers, giving birth to many new trends and developments in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, music, and haute couture.

Sanyu's beloved cafés and bistros are where many of the capital's intellectuals and artists met on a regular basis to exchange ideas or talk about their work, while another of his favorite haunts, the Académie de Grande Chaumière, provided masters and students alike with a regular supply of models for sketching and painting from life. Among the students at the 'large thatched cottage' were many later big names such as Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti. Here Sanyu was introduced to the world of modern sketching and drawing, skills he also frequently practiced when sitting for hours on end in the city's cafés—it is fair to say that he was thus closer to the pulse of the time, and more avant-garde and revolutionary in his approach, than most other Chinese artists of his time. As a matter of fact, the influence of Sanyu's style and technique is obvious in the work of some renowned oil painters, including Pang Xunqin (1906-1985) and Zhang Xian (1901-1936). For young artists in 1930s Shanghai looking for inspiration outside their own country, Sanyu's bold lines and aesthetically exaggerated depictions of the human body were a model of cosmopolitan avant-gardism.

Over his career as an oil painter (from 1929 to 1966), Sanyu's preferred motifs were female nudes, still lifes, flowers, animals, and the occasional landscape. Around the 1930s, pastel shades of pink and white, combined with some black, dominated his compositions, which tended to be structurally succinct and straightforward. The colors were applied with an astonishing degree of restraint: very soft hues that are sometimes faint to the point of being hardly visible. Thanks to financial support from various sources, Sanyu could afford to use expensive canvas for his oil paintings that are brimming with Fauvist passion and Expressionist tension and energy, at times taken to the point of Surrealist spontaneity. He excelled at employing Western media, colors and subjects to give expression to an understated aestheticism and lyrical elegance that owe a lot to the basic tenets of traditional Chinese visual arts. This strong Eastern flavor was one of the reasons why Sanyu was able to establish himself as a truly original painter on the French art scene, and to repeatedly have his works displayed at various salon exhibitions.

Sanyu had a passion for animals and often visited zoos with friends. He first started painting with oils in 1929, and in addition to his famous nudes and plants, he also painted leopards, deer, horses, cats, and dogs. One example is 'White Pekinese,' created in the 1930s. It is one of his earlier oil paintings, with white, black and pink colors, giving it a seemingly conservative and reserved tone. Sanyu was known for his unique style: simple composition, a contour without lines, and a lazy body sketched with simple pink and white. In this painting, the tone seemingly expresses the gentle temperament of the dog. The ears and the tail tinted with pink under the white background shows how simple and powerful the strokes are. Compared with Xu Beihong's sketches from around the same period, filled with jumping animals (such as horses and lions), Sanyu's animals appear to be subjective and poetic, enduring and timeless.

With a clear shape and a steady structure, 'White Pekinese' is a work of harmony. It takes advantage of the flatness of the medium and is well adorned, demonstrating the simple elegance of folk art that fascinated Sanyu in the 1930s. The whole picture shows soft and gentle milky white and pink, which are reserved and comforting, reminding viewers of a sort of infinitely white artistic conception. Its arrangement of color and layout is similar to Snayu's nudes and pink vases from the same period.

French collector Henri-Pierre Roché, who collected works of modern artists, Swiss composer Johan Franco, American photographer Robert Frank, and Jean-Claude Riedel, who ran an antique trading business in the 1960s have all sponsored or collected Sanyu's work. 'White Pekinese' was at first part of Riedel's collections. As an art dealer in Paris, Riedel was also a discerning collector. He purchased a large number of Sanyu's works through Roché's widow in the 1960s, and then opened a gallery in Paris. As a fan of Sanyu's works, he began promoting Sanyu's magnificent art. He once said, "Here I am in a disrupted universe…Sanyu's picture depict a motionless choreography whose simplicity is brought out by the mastery of space and bodies. The neutral shapes come out without excessive narration, and forms emerge, with a tranquil identity, as though they arose from and Asia Eden, in their tranquil identity. But do be not misled by this. Identity does not mean exact repetition. Serialization is foreign to Sanyu, he is a demanding artist. And, far from an allegoric discourse, a mysterious presence emanates from this work in which bodies are emblems."

(Rita Wong,anyu Catalogue Raisonne: Oil Paintings Volume Two, The Li Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation, Taipei, 2011, pp.?54-57)