ILLUSTRATED:
The Art of Pang Jiun , National Art Museum of China, Beijing,
China; National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan, 2008,
color illustrated, p. 74

Born and bred as an artist, Pang remained active and immersed in art throughout his entire life. His parents had undergone the baptism of Western oil painting, and been great promoters of modern art in China. Absorbing both the experience and knowledge of his parents, while at the same time being imbued in Oriental art and culture, Pang Jiun soon began to develop his own individual style of painting.

Pang Jiun’s oil painting style has all the characteristics of Eastern art, including a penchant for lines drawn in black ink, which add whole new shades of aesthetic allure to his artistic vocabulary, firmly underlining the compact yet passionate quality of his work. Pang has earned particular praise for his sublime grey tones, both classical and modern in their appeal. Some people say that Pang’s paintings “are a bit reminiscent of Wu Guanzhong’s,” and this is probably largely due to the fact that both artists are fond of using the color grey and enjoy a lyrical mode. However, their styles are really quite distinct. Others have called Pang Jiun “the Qi Baishi of oil painting,” a statement indicative of their shared love of the freehand (xieyi) style and ability to capture the essence of their subjects. As Qi Baishi himself put it, “The art of painting lies in treading the fine line between likeness and unlikeness: if your work does not resemble your subject at all, you are just a cheat; if it resembles it too much, you are just producing kitsch.”