The Path of the Artist Pan Yulian: Creativity Through the Lens of Life Experience

This article is dedicated to the study of the creative biography of the artist Pan Yulian (1895–1977), with the artist's life experience being considered an important dimension for understanding her artistic practice. In the Russian-speaking academic community, the overall picture of her life is not sufficiently represented and requires separate study. Based on a wide range of sources—chronologies of her life, albums of reproductions, newspaper publications, and other scholarly works—her complete life trajectory is reconstructed. The article covers the entire path of the artist's life, from her birth in Yangzhou into a poor family to her death in Paris in 1977, including her years of study in Europe, her return to China, and then many years of life and creative work in France. The authors comprehensively apply cultural-historical and historical-biographical methods, as well as formal-stylistic and comparative methods: the first two serve to illuminate the cultural-historical context of Pan Yulian's life and work, while the latter two trace the trajectory of stylistic evolution in her works. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that for the first time Pan Yulian's creative biography is presented in a relatively complete form within Russian art studies, establishing basic biographical markers for future research and contributing to the further study of the history of Chinese art in Russia. The artist's life experience is intentionally examined as an independent research topic, which is an important component for understanding her artistic practice, rather than as a historical-cultural background for analyzing the artist's style. The results of the research show that Pan Yulian's creative path has always been inextricably linked to her personal fate. Her sufferings did not break her but became fertile ground for her creativity. Pan Yulian's painting, which combines Western plasticity and Eastern aesthetics, formed a unique artistic language. Her artistic practice not only provided valuable experience for the synthesis of Western and Eastern art but also served as a specific example for Chinese women artists of the 20th century who sought independence and breakthroughs in an intercultural context. The biographical materials presented in the article can serve as a basic reference source for future research.