Pan Yuliang
Sold into a brothel as a teenager, she became the first Chinese woman shown in French collections
Pan Yuliang was orphaned as a small child in Yangzhou and raised by an uncle addicted to opium, who sold her into a brothel in her early teens to cover his debts. She spent several years there before a progressive customs official, Pan Zanhua, visiting on official business, arranged to buy her freedom. He later married her, an unusual match given her background, and encouraged her ambition to study painting.
She enrolled at the Shanghai Art School, one of the first institutions in China to teach Western-style painting from live models, and later won a scholarship to study in France and Italy, becoming the first Chinese woman to have work acquired by French national art collections. She developed a style blending Chinese brushwork with Western technique, working especially in nude self-portraiture, a subject that scandalised conservative opinion in China.
Returning to Shanghai in the 1930s, she faced sustained hostility over both her past and her subject matter, and after a difficult period she left China again for Paris in 1937, never able to return for the rest of her life. She lived modestly there for decades, largely apart from her husband, supporting herself through her art and occasional teaching.
She died in Paris in 1977. Most of her paintings and sculptures were later sent to China according to her wishes, and are held today at the Anhui Provincial Museum.