Born in the same year as the Republic of China (1912), Wang Pan-youn was a native from the village of Hsu Jia Hung in the north of the Jiangsu Province. He migrated to Taiwan after 1949 and after passing through many places, eventually settled down to a simple and idyllic life, without worldly strife or concerns, at, I-lan, a little town in North-eastern Taiwan.

The proud painter, Wang Pan-youn, was an orphan from a wealthy family in the days after the ROC was established. He had a growing up background that included tasting destitution while still a young child and experiencing a beautiful yet bitter sad love during his teenage years. With the retrospective exhibition held by the National Museum of History in 2001, memory of his art and stories of his lifetimes have once again been brought back to everyone's minds. In 2002, he was awarded the medal for the arts prize in The Fifth National Arts and Literature Award, was an apt recognition for his lifetime of unrelenting and tireless contributions in creating. Wang Pan-youn treasured his paintings and treated them like part of his heart and soul. Over the years, not many have been circulated within the market. Today, at the ripe old age of 92, he still keeps some of the works by his side, which might be left to his offspring in the future, although he has also expressed an intention to donate them to the government. Due to his scrupulous care of his paintings, as if they were made of gold, very little works get to be circulated in the market.

In the artwork, An Autumn Afternoon, the streets were lined with many squarish and upright buildings, only tall, erect branches could be seen of the trees, and a few pedestrians were all that embellished the delightful cool autumn days, rendering a calm and quiet over the elegant and refined little town. This piece of work is slightly different from Wang Pan-youn's elements of extreme simplicity. The high and low, extended and stretched vertical lines portrayed on the canvass, formed another kind of spatial beauty that was sparse and scattered yet delicately balanced.