05/08/2026
Too many great women artists have been forgotten or erased
Qinqin Liu
Compassionate ARTS/ Posts for Peace and Justice
Debra Muzikar
Mother Earth/Fragile Planet
Madison Ross
Aldonia R Bailey
She was sold to a brothel at fourteen. By thirty, she had become the first woman in Chinese history to win a scholarship to study art in Paris. By forty, her n**e paintings were scandalizing both Shanghai and the Seine—too bold for Mao's China, too foreign for the purists, yet too brilliant to ignore. Her name was Pan Yuliang, and for most of the 20th century, she was a ghost: erased from Chinese textbooks, stored in Parisian archives under "unknown artists," and buried in an attic in suburban Montparnasse with four thousand paintings stacked around her coffin. Today, art historians are finally whispering what they should have said decades ago: she was China's own Matisse.
But here's the thing about Pan Yuliang—she didn't just paint n**es. She painted from the n**e. From a place of intimate knowledge that no male artist, East or West, could fake. Having survived the brothels of Wuhu, she understood vulnerability as power, the female body not as object but as sanctuary. Her women lounge and stretch and gaze back at you, unashamed, painted in a wild fusion of impressionist color and traditional ink brushwork. Critics called her work obscene. She called it truth. And when China turned its back on her in 1937, she chose exile in Paris over erasure at home, teaching at Beaux-Arts for half a man's salary and quietly outliving every one of her tormentors.
We desperately wanted to feature her stunning paintings in this post—but most of Pan Yuliang's surviving masterpieces are n**es, and social media platforms simply won't allow us to share them. So instead, we leave you with this: a woman who painted her way from a brothel to the Beaux-Arts, who died whispering to return her work to China, and whose spirit—as one art historian put it—still waits in a cold museum storage room, calling us to finally see her.
