PANG TO

Pang Tao is the daughter of Pang Xunqin and Qiu Ti, two important founding members of the early Chinese avant-garde art group the Storm Society (Jue Lan She), which was formed in the 1930s. Pang worked as an independent artist and an educator in academia from the 1950s to 1970s, a period marked by turmoil. Not interested in engaging with societal affairs, Pang was discounted as conservative, and her works did not spark much critical debate within the binary categorisation of art as either “new” or “traditional” at the time. Pang lived in Paris for a year in 1984 and was among the first group of artists who were sent to Europe to study art. Pang’s notable series Revelation of Bronze, which she began in the early 1980s, serves as a significant point of departure when she consciously moved away from realism towards full abstraction. In this seminal series, the artist flattens the imagery of bronzeware from the Shang dynasty in a meticulous manner and develops the painting through a formal exploration that goes well beyond decoration. The picture plane is imbued with colour patches of abundant variations of hues and fluid geometry to give the representation of a monolithic artefact an illusionary solidity.