 Good afternoon. I'm Elizabeth Sackler and it is a pleasure to welcome you to the Center for Feminist Art and to have you here this afternoon for this particular lecture. The Center opened in March of 2007 and in addition to being an exhibition gallery or galleries that we have here, we're also an education center and we are dedicated to feminist art and feminist activism and our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and to maintain really a dynamic learning center and we've had a very fine year and a half. We have had wonderful continuities of programming over the year and this particular lecture is the culmination really of a three-part series. For those of you who were here yesterday, you know that Gloria Steinem's panel, Sex, Trafficking and the New Abolitionists included Tiana Bienami who is Executive Director of Equality Now and Rachel Lloyd who was the founder and Executive Director of GEMS which is Girls Educational and Mentoring Services and Jennifer Cody Epstein's talk today is going to add another historical dimension and cultural dimension to sex trafficking and the new abolitionists as Gloria defined it and I'm really delighted to have Jennifer here. Just as an aside I'm an avid reader of the New York Times book review. I read it every Sunday and I have had some of my most wonderful guests emerge as a result of it and I read the review I don't know however many months ago it was now six months ago or something like that. Was it in March and read the book immediately and immediately contacted Jennifer and asked her if she would come in and read from the book and discuss it and I'm delighted that she accepted and when she did I realized of course once we had Gloria's panel coming in and Sonia Osorio was here a few weeks ago she's the Director of Now NYC and she was speaking about set and the title of her talk was Sex Trafficking in Your Backyard and so she was discussing exactly what's going on in New York City regarding sex trafficking. In this in this instance and today we really have the opportunity with Jennifer's book The Painter from Shanghai. She retells the story of a Chinese prostitute turned post-impressionist painter and a little bit about Jennifer her fiction has appeared in several literary magazines. She has lived and worked in the United States, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Italy for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Mademoiselle, Self and Parents as well as for the NBC and HBO Networks. She has a master's in international relations from John Hopkins University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University where she is an adjunct professor in the School of Arts. She lives in Brooklyn which of course makes us all very happy at the Brooklyn Museum to have an artist or writer come in from our borough with her husband and her two daughters and Jennifer will there will be a book signing in the museum gifts and gift store after the reading and Jennifer will be signing and selling books so I'd like you to join me in welcoming Jennifer Cody Epstein. I'm gonna just first give a little bit of background on Panyolong because I certainly had not heard of her before I undertook this and sort of rather ambitious endeavor over ten years ago and most people that I've spoken with also had not heard of her so just a little bit of background she was the details on her life were actually somewhat sketchy I suspect that she had a very lot of control over the details of her life someone understandably given what that you know those details include but according to several sources she was born in 1895 and her family name was actually Chen at that point Chen Chuqing seems to be the name that people believe that she had she was the daughter of artisans small family but fairly successful that made a living out of embroidering hats so she had some background in embroidery from her mother her parents both died when she was eight she went to live with her uncle who like many people at that time in large part thanks to the West was an obiomatic and he sold her into a brothel when she was about 14 she was bought out after several years by Pan Zhanhua who was a young follower of Deng Xiaoping and was a young Republican tax official she became his concubine which officially was not legal at that point but many officials continued to do it and because this generated a lot of rumor and buzz where they were in Wu who at that time she ended up going to Shanghai to kind of escape the rumors and create some distance it was there that she entered the Shanghai Art Academy in 1918 this was one of the very first modern art schools in China it was founded by Liu Haisu who was another sort of pioneering painting master there were a series of painters including Pan Yulang and Ju Beihong who fused Western and Eastern art together in very new and interesting ways and I think that they were sort of among the first people to be doing this in China and she sort of fell under his tutelage and did very well in 1920 she ended up getting a scholarship to the UN University in France on the strength of her painting from there she went to the Beaux Arts in Paris and she studied there as a quote unquote free student there's a French way of saying that but my French is atrocious so I won't I won't try officially she wasn't on the roster I had a researcher there sort of confirm that she's not actually in the archives as an official student but like many students she probably was just attending classes when she could get into them and got obviously a very great education from that because her painting really bloomed she was mentored in Paris by Zhu Beihong who was a rival of Lu Haesu a little bit like Matisse and Picasso very very vitriolic relationship and they put each other down whenever they could in the newspapers but they both have very bold interesting art she came back to China in 1927 and tried to create a life for herself painting what she had learned to paint in the past couple decades largely this was comprised of nudes and because she couldn't find at that point in a very confusion oriented society people to model for her she would paint herself using mirrors and I'm sure some of my design this was very controversial and for a while she was quite popular but as Civil War sort of bloomed there was a right-wing sort of backlash against modernist values and European aesthetics and her work came under very open criticism and sometimes actually under physical attack which was pretty devastating to her she continued to teach and to live into paint in Shanghai and Nanjing until 1937 for a while she lived with Panjian and his first wife which by all accounts was pretty unpleasant for everybody and then one of her exhibitions in Shanghai was was vandalized and a work that she cared a lot about was destroyed and that marked sort of the beginning of sort of her the end of her experiences in China she left in 1937 ahead of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing and she lived out the rest of her life in self-exile in Paris as most people know in 1949 the communists took over China which had some very positive impacts on a lot of things it did not have a particularly positive impact on Pan Yulong's kind of art because it was denounced as very degenerate so she ended up staying in Paris never taking citizenship always hoping to go back exhibiting at the Salon the French National Art Exhibition the Salon d'Independence in 1945 she won a gold the gold award at the Salon d'Independence as I said I don't speak French very well so apologies for mauling that and her work was also exhibited in the Paris Museum of Modern Art so she she had quite a good reputation in Paris although she never became more than modestly successful in the commercial sense and she died by most accounts in poverty in 1977 she's buried in Montparnasse cemetery and the legend is that she she was buried wearing Chinese clothes because she wanted to underscore her chineseness and her legacy is more than 4,000 works of art these include sculptures sketches oil paintings watercolors traditional fervest she just she just tried everything she was voracious with her art and after I do my reading I'm going to try and show you a little bit of a sample of some of the works that I've been able to find and her legacy also as I mentioned in my afterward included continued controversy because recently as 1993 one of her exhibits in Beijing had to be edited censored because the nudes in it were causing such an outcry so she continues to be a much discussed and I think very important character in Chinese modern art and I would say in feminist art in general I'm going to read from two sections of my novel the first section is taking place when she is at the Shanghai Art Academy studying under Liu Haisu she ran into some trouble initially while she was there because while her coloration and her technical skills were outstanding she had a large amount of trouble initially painting nude bodies which I think given her background is sort of fascinating and the fact that she ended up overcoming this and making sort of the traditional impressionistic nude sort of the basis of her art I think is a tremendous statement of her determination and her strength and part of what I was trying to do in this section was understand how that came about how she was able to conquer these insecurities and sort of the scars of her past to paint such beautiful nude paintings so a week later Yilong still hasn't been to a class but she is at least finally working inspired or shamed by Liu Haisu she's wrapped her brain and her contacts and finally found a model to meet her requirements it took nerve determination and to mortifying refusals but when the solution came it seemed at once both pure genius and Sharon Sanity she started that very same afternoon now she choose a cuticle studying her subject I'm supposed to live in you she tells the girl that's what teacher Hong has said her model stares back balefully goose bumps sprinkle her bare thighs Yilong rubs her own arms it is chilly the dorm that she's moved into both because it's close to school and because it allows her to avoid Qi Hua and I Ying was her two other people from her household while she works prohibits charcoal breath years for good reason last year more than 30 girls in a similar dorm had died in a midnight fire pounding on a door bolted to keep them safe setting her teeth Yilong mixes her flesh tones violent yellow earth red fine black Venetian red she creates a quick and expert outline of the body shape on her canvas and then she loads her brush and begins to fill it in as she works she doesn't let herself think or question she just paints solidly methodically modeling in the peach tinge curbs the beige shadows when she reaches the breast she hears godmother's voice that was the madame from the brothel if they touch the breasts directly charged seven extra 10 for the feet how she will bitch she mutters and moves on to the hips the belly the puckered kiss of the naval she's just backing up to fill up some hair some more when the clamor wraps outside a funeral is in progress on the street at first Yilong tries to work through it but it's no use the mood is broken she sets her brush in her jar and throws on her shawl against the cold walking to her desk she uncorks the wine that she's taken to sipping as she works she pours a glass and then she walks to the open window the coffin is set just outside the house across the street the deceased must have died away from home but there is no shortage of mourners the daughters are dressed in black grandchildren and great-grandchildren in blue the son-in-laws were stark white and bright yellow underscoring this colorful chorus of bereavement is the clicking of the pat cha dice the morning gong hung to the right of the house's doorway signifies that the departed is a woman the presence of great-grandchildren means that she was probably quite old but Yilong is too far away to make out the portrait that's propped on a stool by the coffin amid layers of flowers and other offerings she tries to recall the grandmothers who greet her sometimes when she comes home one has a face like a withered pumpkin and a sweet and oddly young voice she sometimes calls out to Yilong going to school little daughter when are you going to paint my picture Yilong imagines the same woman now lying still in her coffin with her face and her body covered by yellow and blue cloth what would it be like to paint that in life study a body that has no life in it at all her anatomy class works from textbooks and an old medical skeleton donated by the Mission Clinic because it's missing two ribs but Leonardo was said to have learned from the actual dead spending hours in darkened morgues dissecting peeling back sketching her classmates raised to see death as the ultimate contaminant were openly horrified by this Yilong though had merely shrugged at least inwardly she couldn't help but think that if the Italian master had simply taken up the flesh trade he did gain just as firm a sense of human physiology now she studies her model again the hardened nipples the goose bumps skin and the sight of her like that stripped alone hurts her heart Yilong shuts her eyes and then berates herself in silence stupid whore you can't paint her if you can't see her and then just like that it hits her I can't see her electrified she opens her eyes teacher Hong's words coming back with a new meaning try to see the skin as more than simply skin he had said as advice it is directly and fully at odds with that that Jin Ling once gave her it's just skin and yet studying her model again now Yilong suddenly realizes that her troubles then and now arise from her own failure to see skin as either more or less of itself to see it outside of a spectrum of pain in our old life it was a liability a soft surface waiting for wounds as such at the academy it inspires not creative passion but a wave of remembered revulsion and in both places she's been unable as hard as she might try to see it as beautiful as something worth painting outside the morning as well I come back mother come back her heart racing Yilong shuts her eyes once more she thinks of Jin Ling that was her mentor at the brothel not in death as she was the last time that Yilong saw her but in those impossibly early days when Yilong had first begun to attend to her before she fully understood a body's worth in monetary terms and could value it only in the currency of beauty she thinks of the way the Jin Ling skin had looked in the early morning sheened in perspiration stretched out in sheer joy limbed in the early light of a sunrise beauty she thinks and she looks again into the mirror and perhaps it's the timing the sun is finally setting touching everything in the room with orange and gold but at that moment mirror girl strikes her as almost ethereal as far from your skin as a rainbow is from rain Yilong stares at herself her thin thighs her curving hip and for the first time in years she truly sees herself she sees herself as finally free of the brokers probing fingers of strange men's hands of the jewelry that binds it debt like a chain like to debt picking up her palette she hurriedly paints out the stiff first image she cocks her head takes a breath and starts anew she paints until the light outside has seeped away into the black sky until the monks go home and the mourners leave and all that's left is a soft click of the gambler's ivory the next section that I'm going to read is going to take place in Paris in her early days I was trying to imagine how she ended up as a free student at the Beaux Arts and what her interactions with Zhu Beihong who was a notoriously flamboyant young man in Paris at that point must have been like and this scene is sort of what I came up with in it she is meeting him for the first time she's asked him for some advice and some help because she wants to stay on in France at this point most of her scholarship money has been cut off as it was for many Chinese students there were many many Chinese students studying in Europe at this point but as the country became more enmeshed in civil war the Republican government began to cut those funds and so many of them were just left penniless so Zhu Beihong is nearly a full hour late for their appointment the next day but he makes no pretence of an apology instead in a regal motion that's oddly in keeping with his red velvet coat he waves down a passing waiter he requests a cafe noisette for himself and adds half of a pitcher of milk to the coffee he plunks in several sugar cubes observing him you land notes his soft chin and his full lips both at odds with a broad strong nose Jin lengthy she thinks would have liked this man's face she would have said that his nose predicted strength and finance his lips and chin a weakness for pleasure a fortuitous combination at the hall so the artist says sipping his milky beverage you want to study here but your letter implies complications these explain it better than I could you long removes the other two notes that she had stored in her novel on Tolstoy one is her Kurt Bose arts rejection notice and the other is even curter a communique from the on-way government notifying her that both her scholarships have been withdrawn the young artist scans first one then the other you lang settles back to study Parisian cafe culture something that on her last brief trip here she had no time for it is indeed a far cry from Leon as she watches a man dressed in a Harlequin costume prances past delivering a note to a girl who was sitting across the room the girl reads it and blows a languid kiss to the note sender she's dressed in what looks like a man's military uniform her poodle tucked like a purse beneath one arm between its golden hair clips and monkey fur trimmed little sweater the dog is decidedly better dressed than its owner or you lying thanks dryly herself you are with the new sign of French Institute Zubei Hong is asking you long forces her attention back to the table just for six months before I transferred to the art academy and Leon long enough to tire of grammar drills and endless lessons on table manners I'd assume he drums his fingers were you there for the demonstrations sorry I should mention this to the there was a contingency of Chinese students at Leon University that actually took over the university in I believe nineteen eighteen right after you long would have gotten there they were demanding that the school create space for them because it had essentially promised that it would and then it did not so sort of the early stirrings of political activism and many of these demonstrators went back to join the revolution the communist revolution in China you participated zoo asks now no but I supported them and as he lifts an eyebrow there in the right the Chinese console told them he'd guarantee their admission well from what I've read that's not his story now you long sets her cup down then he's a coward and a liar her companion looks amused shouldn't you be careful for all you know he might have friends here in this cafe well if he does they're not friends of mine still you long casts another glance around the dark young woman is now feeding her poodle almond pastry shredding it with gold painted fingertips before pushing the bits between the dogs black gums do you ever honey your words to be hung is asking reaching again for the sugar well I did it one time but I've learned that you can't paint with honey he smiles a slow warm grim that's grin that seems to illuminate the air around him Bravo you'll do well here madam was a madame Yilan corrects him that's right he says without interest patting his pockets he pulls out a tarnished cigarette case this stuff about the console he says flicking a gawan to his mouth and putting the case back without offering it to her you heard it directly you lag nods a friend of mine from the academy came to Leon from the Montages faction faction faction and he said he'd been lied to they all did I believe them she laughs remembering although at that point I barely believed I was in France yet and this friend he was one of the radicals he was a student like me or anyone else you long have been going to say like you but even though the young artist graduated from the Bozar it's just last year she senses that he'd bridle the suggestion that they're contemporaries Zube Hong has after all already shown in two salons he's a protégé of the realist Dagnan Buberet it's just that the government had taken away his stipend she continues his job he worked in an auto factory there paid less than a living wage let alone for schooling it left no time to study in any case she stares into her coffee it's excellent cleanly bitter far stronger than the black-tinged brew that she's allowed herself since her funds were cut off it's hard for us all Zube Hong is saying sipping his sugared sludge we didn't come here like rich Americans to drink and eat and eat and dance with Charleston all night he nods towards a table of them speaking loudly in their twanging Yankee voices we have to make our own way we have to work he was trying to get into a course that would let him both live and study Yulang protests and he failed the system failed him it failed all of us Yulang eyes him evenly it's clear that he is bored now by this subject she picks another which she expects he will like more is it true that you've been accepted into the next salon predictably the artist's round inverts into a small smug smile four paintings so far and five more that they're deliberating on he leans back expansively but I want to hear more of you how did you manage to transfer to the Leon Bozart so quickly principal Liu Haisu had helped to set up the arrangement he had an acquaintance there Liu Haisu Zhu pronounces the name as though it rings a distant bell and Yulang suppresses a small smile in Shanghai Zube Hong and Liu Haisu are now almost famous as rivals as Picasso and Matisse are here in Europe it's even said that when Liu Haisu started his heavenly horse painting society in Shanghai Zube Hong counter launched his own painting society here the heavenly dog society so named because dogs eat horses having met Zube Hong Yulang now fully believes the story it's about the lever at level of hubris she'd expect from a man wearing red velvet so Montur Lou pulled some strings to get you in at Leon he's saying now but I take it they don't reach to Paris he sounds distinctly pleased by this fact as he picks up the other letter Yulang's Bozart rid of those arts rejection respectable performance particularly in coloration he translates with an ease that makes her envious that's not so bad many people don't even survive the entrance it's still three days of exercises perspective portraiture architectural drawing etc Yulang nods I think I did all right up until the oral part grilled in Renaissance art history by a man who might have sat with Marat on the revolutionary tribunals she felt her felt her French disintegrate hard one word by hard one word everything she'd memorized phrases dates architectural jargon had vanished like so much candied rice paper on her tongue which old fart was it she asks now Lamboor Lamboor Adele something like that ah way Claude Lambert dear he rolls his eyes a negligible talent he got his job because he exhibited with Bissaro in the old days which of course is ironic since Bissaro didn't even go to the Bozart's he glances at the portfolio that has been leaning against her leg throughout their talk Yulang had lugged it here from her pencil this morning despite a fear that this would seem formal may I he asks Yulang nods her mouth suddenly as dry as the cardboard folder itself as Zubehong leaps through its contents his cigarette dangling from his pursed lips the problem she tells him suppressing a surge of anxiety is that even if the Bozart's had accepted me I'd still need a scholarship the government has cut my stipend off too they're cutting off everyone's I guess they need every bit of gold to fight against the warlords pausing over a Cezanne's landscape the young artist chuckles thankfully it's not over her works no one born abroad will ever get a centine from the Bozart's he said it's like trying to pull ivory out of a dog's mouth he shifts through several more pieces staring at each with a practiced intensity before finally stepping out his second half smoked cigarette very impressive he says at last sliding the folder back towards her legs though I would urge you to take yourself to the Louvre immediately for a healthy dose of food on Delacroix and Rembrandt what you must focus on is form that's the meat of art you paint with honey after all madame Pan he waves at another waiter one carrying a small tray of tarts speaking of food how important is it excuse me you're about to move to the culinary capital of Europe some would say the world although I have to say I wish that they would use more salt lifting the pitcher he dumps what's left into his cup a bit splashes less a drip now than a milky shadow of one by the way he adds lowering his voice conspiratorily never salt your foie gras no matter how bland it tastes it's rude it's like taking the last dumpling he conveys the sloshing cups to his lips sips and adds you think I'm joking about the foie gras no about the food well are you like says it with a hint of annoyance she hasn't the faintest idea where this conversation is leading and for all of her hopes of a free meal he's her host hasn't even looked at the menu think about it he says what's more important a good painting or a good slab of beef or for that matter one of those loud poor a dresses my wife is always pointing at the answer comes without hesitation a painting of course he grins again that liquid slow beam and again you long feels an absurd flash of pleasure he is she suddenly realizes a man who flashes his charm like a sword master it is his secret weapon just a meant he says the stake will fill you for a day the dress will when you compliment set least from my wife for a week but in ten years time or a hundred what you've made here he indicates the portfolio will remain your children your children's children will see it you have children the waiter arrives you be hung hands him the creamer although you long wonders why by this point he barely has any coffee left not yet she looks away but I do need a little food to live on don't I a little Zubai Hong concedes as the waiter materializes again to replace the tiny cream pitcher with the flourish and as you'll discover a little in Paris cuts much more than a little elsewhere be way and I moved to Berlin for a while last year thinking it would be cheaper he pops a sugar cube into his mouth of course prices were rising there at a rate beyond comprehension you've heard how it was he crunches swallows audibly bread cost a mark or two with the war's end it costs two hundred billion marks or more by the time we left our friends with jobs were getting paid two or three times daily just to keep up with inflation but even then they had to race to buy the basic things he shakes his head fondly as those this recollection were one of the happier ones of his trip things are better now if you have talent if you know a few tricks no bonbons no fancy hats or shoes on some days maybe even many days no dinner do all of this and you'll get along as I have here he breaks into a hacking chest deep cough that for some might have undermined this last point the waiter appears like a genie a glass of water on his tray as for the schools about Zubei Hong goes on after a sip or two at heart they still don't want anyone who's not born here when they do accept them they give them extraordinary posts not full student status those they leave for the full blooded Frenchmen those few are left after the war of course he finishes his water and you know of course that even if you win the school's highest competition the prederot you won't get the prize or the purse finishing off his coffee he signals the waiter and in French that is virtually as free of shame as it is of an accent request small pot of hot water and he turns back to you long so don't build that into your budget he adds in Chinese the waiter returns with a steaming teapot anything else measure no thank you Andre the young artist produces from its jacket pocket a hard roll that looks suspiciously like those that you long had just seen outside left on the tables by paying customers as he dips it into the milky mixture she stares at her place setting remembering those first dreary weeks in Leone small fork for salads big fork for meat knife for cutting meat not butter spoon for soup or ices but never for the dinner plate and don't look at when you use it and don't touch any of the utensils before you plan to use them somewhat defiantly she picks up her soup spoon studies it what she sees is her own face clouded upside down my husband wants me to come home she says abruptly my wife wants me to stop buying paintings she replies affably my gallery wants me to pay its commission the role will always want us to spend differently to think differently he jabs his finger at her what is it you want to stay the answer wells up fully a small part of her soul I want to live here to paint here I want nothing more but if the bozards won't take me they'll take you she stares at him how I didn't pass the entrance examination there is more than one entrance to the rabbit's burrow if you know where to look have you heard of the free students they're alternates effectively but if you're disciplined and if you form a good relationship with the mette de sesson which is the head of the session in the atelier you can get every bit of as good an education as any French man he finishes the bread wipes his slim fingers on his napkin and while I can't get to a scholarship I can help you to find cheap lodging you wouldn't need to pay much of course if it's not what you want well no you lying forces a smile it's it's so much more than I deserve I would be so grateful he non-spinificently I'll ask him return is that you keep me in mind if you happen to meet anybody useful useful oh critics important painters no picture dealers though if you ask me their goals to squeeze the life from art as we all know it scanning the room his face suddenly brightens hello Fujita he shouts at a couple that's just been seated the darker and more diminutive of the women turns to face them and it's only then that you long sees that it isn't a woman at all it is rather an oriental with a severe hair cut allish glasses and glittering golden hoops in each ear he waves back at zoo be hung then turns back to his companion Fujita sugo hara be hung offers turning back to face her that's Fujita the man you line notes is also wearing lipstick expensive lipstick from the look of it in the flesh as they say he calls himself Leonard here zoo signals the waiter his paintings a bit let bland for me lots of skinny girls and cats but his lines are lovely and of course he's very well connected he's also clearly successful as you long watches ambiously the Japanese artist picks several charts from a passing pastry cart to her own horror her stomach growls loudly she crosses her arms over it quickly are you all right zoo is watching her with amusement what oh of course she fights back a flush I was thinking about that old saying about not being able to draw a cake and eat it too he grunts one of the ways favorites I often heard in Berlin and what did you tell her who be hung pulls his fragile frame slightly straighter that if I give up my art I'll end up eating my dreams and dead dreams are worse than hunger their poison he holds her gaze for a moment and then he licks his teaspoon crunching its last granules of sugar with clear relish that's the that's the reading thank you now I'm going to attempt to use PowerPoint for the very first time in my life I have brought some pictures of Pan Yolong of some of her mentors and just sort of general informational pictures as well as her own paintings it was a photo of Pan Yolong I believe that this was from when she was still in China although I'm not sure a lot of these aren't actually dated or not dated accurately there's another one that is one of her self-portraits this is actually the portrait that I that really started this whole endeavor for me I was at the Guggenheim Museum with my husband seeing an exhibit on modern Chinese art and this painting was on the wall and it just really drew me over because it was so unlike anything else that was in that museum at that time I mean there were lots of sort of sketching inking draws sort of poetry pieces and there were some big propaganda posters but there was nothing like this and I saw it and I read her short biography and just was blown away that's what said everything in motion that's Pan Jamwa her husband it's a sketch that she drew obviously I haven't translated haven't had translated the little poem on the side but I'm sure it says something nice about him that's that's Pan Jamwa's son who became her adopted son and from what I understand is still living in Anhui province today I was not able to get in touch with them although I did try this is a painting that I actually use in the preface of the novel I sort of used a lot of her paintings to try and get insight into what her character might have been like and I really loved this one she has a lot of motherhood themes she never actually had children of her own although most anecdotal accounts say that she was pregnant at least once this was going to be on the cover of my novel in the United States but we couldn't figure out who actually owns the secondary rights to it so we decided not to take the risk but it's one of my favorite paintings of hers and this is a watercolor but you can see she uses so much Western style texture cross hatching sort of really interesting techniques that were very new to her I'm sure in the back these are sort of spanning from I think one of them is 1925 up to 1945 this one I think is 35 and I do one of my scenes sort of based around this one too she had a couple that were sort of luminous nudes like this and I just thought they were really beautiful her colors are very very bold and some of them this is another motherhood theme one again it's just got very bold Chinese lines that is sort of more almost fervent expression and I'm sort of interested by the fact that the baby has no face I think that that's kind of telling it's another another nude I actually tried to repaint this as part of my quest to understand oil painting and I really made a bundle of it but it was interesting to just kind of see how she how she'd worked sorry that shows up twice that's one of her still lifes she did a lot of flowers and fruit this is another fan dance picture that's another self-portrait and she never with the exception of one painting of herself that I've seen she always has this very distant sort of pensive look on her face which I think is sort of part of her intrigue for me just really made me very curious about her story that's a relatively later on in her life it's a painting of war I don't think it's it's quite as she seemed to do better in my mind with beauty with themes of beauty but I think that she was very torn apart by what was happening to China both during World War two and then afterwards this is a bathers painting and again I think that this may have been done in the 30s but what strikes me about it is that's Matisse's famous bathers painting and I feel like you can really see I mean down to the positions where she's there they're sort of the angle of their heads that the fact that the third character is has her back turned it just strikes me that she's she's really experimenting with the things that she's seeing around her at this point again this this sort of seemed evocative Matisse of Matisse to me says on thank you this is actually one of Lou Hasu's landscapes I thought it'd be interesting to show show that that's Lou Hasu himself painting in the class of the Shanghai Art Academy probably in the early 30s and you can see that there's a nude standing right up there and that's actually there was there are a number of women in the classes which is also sort of interesting for the times that's one of Pan Yulang sort of more traditional she went through periods where she'd really explore more traditional art forms and oftentimes these were horses and that was interesting to me because I had a picture of Zubei Hong's in there he was also very well known for his horses that's the movie that was actually made out of the one source that seems to be around on her life and it's a very controversial source but it was a series of articles sort of fictionalized biographical articles that was written under a pseudonym in a Chinese art magazine in the 1980s and eventually they were put into a novel in China by the magazine itself and there were symposiums trying to figure out who that the writer might have been nobody really ever figured it out but the story is that that they were based on discussions that Pan Yulang had had with her daughter-in-law and then the daughter-in-law supposedly passed these stories along to whoever the writer was and again if there's been lots of debate as to how authentic it is but they're really it's the only real source out there that people seem to fall back on this is one painting of herself that has her smiling which I think is sort of interesting this was done later in Paris I think it might have been even as late as the early 50s I'm not sure but you know by contrast to all the other sort of somber sad pictures she's actually painted herself looking content and obviously pretty relaxed here so yeah that helps right this is in most of her work now is in the Anhui Provincial Museum in Hefe they've Hefe China which is an Anhui province in China that was where she was from originally and she bequeathed her art to China before she died and it all most of it ended up at this museum this is a relatively new wing in the museum it wasn't around when I first started researching and I again had written them several times asking them if I could come I sent a researcher to sort of knock on their door and try to take pictures at that point everything was being sort of categorized and cataloged in the basement and they wouldn't they wouldn't let us near it so you know I don't know whether they're supportive or not of my project but I'm hoping to get there at some point that's a that's the same painting that you saw at the museum being looked at by a modern Chinese person and I think that's it I would say that was probably in the 1920s right it dates yeah certainly if there were male models models I know it's an end that that continued for a long time yeah I mean I think there certainly was an outcry I think that in there are different stories some stories say that she was the first woman to get into the Shanghai Art Academy but again that's hard to confirm I'd also heard that there were a couple other female students there when she was there I think by all accounts Lu Haisu was pretty progressive so he my guess is he probably would have allowed the women in at least to paint the men I mean the other women I know that that when Yulong went to the Nanjing Central University which is she got into some trouble at Shanghai Art Academy I think she slapped a colleague for calling her a prostitute or something and she left and went to work in Nanjing under Zubei Hong and she sort of caused another scandal because to sort of protest the fact that women were not allowed into the classes where male nudes were posing she dressed up as a man and went in and painted painted one of the male nudes and that caused caused a bit of an outburst and I think that would have been in the early 1930s are there any more questions that I was influenced by sure I mean they they're trying to think of you know the first one that comes to mind strangely enough is Dave Eggers who who wrote his second second book was called what is the what and it was based on a narrative story by a Sudanese refugee who he'd actually sat down with and worked with and all the proceeds are going to help you know that the victims of the civil war in Sudan certainly there were there were others you know I think it was more it wasn't simply biographical fiction it was also just historical fiction in general that really really impressed me and I've always always loved it I mean everything from Edith Wharton you know on has been you know just really interesting to me so there was one really terrific novel that was recently translated into into English by the University of Columbia Press and I found it really just riveting it's by a Chinese writer who apparently is very prolific and popular in China but I'd never heard of him his name is a Ye Xiao Yan and he wrote a novel interestingly enough about Nanjing on the eve of the Japanese invasion and he set that scene against a love story which is so improbable but it was and it's also strangely enough a very funny book which you would not think anything you know set against the rape of Nanjing would be but that just the way that he used details and sort of the fearlessness which with which he sort of took over that world was very inspiring to me right largely by reading I mean I took a number I was at Columbia's MFA program at the time and I was able very luckily to take classes you know in different departments so I took a number of Chinese history classes and professor Zelen Madeline Zelen there is the head of the East Asian Studies Department and she gave me some suggestions for books that that actually there's two books in particular that focus on prostitution in China during this period there's one by Sue Gronwald called beautiful merchandise and another one called dangerous pleasures by her shatter Gail her shatter so I read those pretty pretty carefully and intently took a lot of notes I read materials on prostitution in general I was sort of interested yesterday they talked about the Mustang ranch and I'd actually read you know a memoir that came out of the Mustang ranch to try and get a sense of you know just the modern-day feel of prostitution and you know interestingly enough there did seem to be you know it seems to be the same experience from what I read and there was also a novel a Chinese novel called the sing song girls of Shanghai I believe which was a novel written in China I think in the 1940s and it was recently translated and it was all set in a brothel so I relied on that a little bit too but it was basically just you know relying on a few sources talking to people when I could and and just trying to fill in the gaps through imagination which is largely what the book ended up being I cannot no I read some Japanese and so that helps because the characters are oftentimes the same so you can get a sense of whether you're on the right page or not but for important sources I would have a translator translate things for me and also do research on the internet and stuff because it was just you know much much faster that way I had lived I'd lived in Hong Kong and had made several trips to Shanghai in my early 30s so I wasn't able to actually go for this project just a combination of finances and the fact that I had two small children as you know kept me from kept me from going but I was able to kind of rely on contacts that I made and to you know just I had a good sense of the city just been wandering around it and from living in Hong Kong and I'd also spent some time in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and other Chinese cities so you know it helped me feel a little less intimidated about setting a normal in that scene so thank you I think it's I have a long-standing interest in women in the arts I think that's part of it I'm also fascinated by the cultural intersections in art you know what happens when two very different cultures sort of clash and merge or combine and the art forms that can spring from that so I think it was the combination of seeing that this this woman had you know melded both forms into such a for me and again I'm a very untutored art historian but I just really was affected by her work I thought it was quite lovely and then to read her story and see that it had come from such a completely grim set of circumstances that she'd had such a difficult life and that despite all of these things that were set against her being a woman in China which you know is not easy to begin with and then being a prostitute and a sexual slave and then a concubine and yet somehow she she'd overcome all these things and went on to create beautiful art I just felt that that was such an amazing story and it made me want to not only know more about her but I felt like people had to know about her I pulled my husband over and I said why does nobody know about this woman and he said well they should and you should write her story and I was like I told him he was nuts because I didn't think that it was at all within my scope but the idea just never went away I just kept on trying to write other things that seemed safer and they weren't very interesting to me so eventually I finally did after my first child was born I finally sat down very early one morning and I just started to see if I could do this and then just got hooked on the process that was that was proven several times as I tried to learn how to oil paint for this I'm not very good visual art but I do think that you know writing can be an art form in its own way and interestingly enough from talking to other figurative artists whom I know the process seems somewhat similar but you kind of have an idea you etch it out you refine it you use different tones and nuances and so in that way I suppose I am but I could never do anything like this thank you very much see this is the first time that I've had an opportunity to even ask Jennifer anything about the book and there are a lot of questions I find it so intriguing when somebody is riveted by a story like this and then makes the kind of commitment and comes up with a wonderful wonderful readable and enjoyable and heart-wrenching really book very descriptive and quite beautiful so it's on sale at the bookstore and Jennifer will be downstairs signing and I'd like to thank you all for coming and wish you a very happy holiday and a happy new year and look forward to having you come back to the center for our various programming beginning in January thanks very much