Fan Tchunpi (方君璧, Fang Junbi) was born in 1898 in Fuzhou, China, toward the last years of the Qing dynasty. She was the 11th daughter of a large well-established tea-merchant father. Her mother died when she was a child. Her older sister by 14 years, of the same mother,  Fang Junying (方君瑛), had studied abroad in Japan with her other progressive siblings, both brothers and sisters, and had returned to China imbued with passionate revolutionary ideas to overthrow the imperial government. In 1911, they plotted an armed uprising in Guangzhou, and one of the brothers was killed; later, he was venerated as one of the famed 72 martyrs.

 

When the revolution succeeded, and the republic was established later that year, the young revolutionaries were given scholarships to study abroad. This extended group included Fan’s older sister, and her revolutionary comrade-in-arms, and sister–in-law, Zeng Xing (曾醒). The group decided to bring some of their younger siblings along, sharing the expenses for a new education. Up to that point, the 14-year-old Fan had grown up in a large household, and also neglected like an orphan. In 1912, she left home with this group, which also included Zeng Xing’s 16-year–old younger brother, and Fan’s future husband, Tsen Tsongming (曾仲鳴, Zeng Zhongming). These young idealistic people were eager, and determined to find ways of bringing China into the modern era. 

 

Not long after their arrival in France, WWI started, and they were relocated to Bordeaux. Not knowing any French, Fan Tchunpi started school with the kindergarten girls. Progressing fast though, she soon was well integrated into the French language and culture, but also studied the Chinese classics and poetry from her elders. 

 

In l917, she started art studies at the Academie Jullian, and then moved onto the École des Beaux Arts of Bordeaux. From there, in 1919, she passed the entrance exam of the elite École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and enrolled as the first Chinese woman artist. As a graduate of the Beaux Arts, Fan had received the most thorough and rigorous training for an artist of the era. Her new paintings were accepted at the Salon de Printemps in Paris, and one was selected for the cover of “Les Annales”, the art magazine.

 

Meanwhile, the original scholarship fellows had finished their studies, and were scheduled to return to China. Not to be left alone, and loving each other, Fan and Tsen, who was still working on a doctorate for literature at the Université de Lyons, were thought best to be married. In 1922, before their friends left, they had a ceremony at the alpine lake town of Annecy. Her husband received his doctorate, soon after. They stayed in France two more years before returning to China in 1925.

 

The returning group of students, with new knowledge and skills after ten years abroad, soon found themselves in the midst of political and economic power. Fang Junying, Fan’s older sister, was an exception. She was greatly disappointed to find a dissipation of revolutionary fervor in the society, and some of her former comrades were leading dissolute lives. In 1923, her despair drove her to suicide. Fan, returning in 1925, was devastated.

 

For two years, Fan maintained her position as a teacher of western painting at the Guangdong University. During that time, her husband, Tsen, had become deeply involved in assisting the political work of his close friend and a leading political figure, Wang Jingwei (汪精衛). 

 

In 1930, Fan, missing the fulfillment of her art practice, returned to Paris to further her study of painting at the atelier of master artist Albert Besnard. She concentrated in defining her own self, and had her works exhibited at the national salons. When she returned to China, she began her search to combine the western techniques in painting with a Chinese sense of the poetics. She learned to use Chinese art materials, with paper, brush, ink and colors, and forms like hanging scrolls. Through most of the 1930s, in the ascendant cultural circle of Shanghai, her prominence as an artist flourished. She associated frequently with other artists, both in the western style and artists of the new schools of Chinese classical paintings like Qi Baishe, Zhang Daqian and Xu Baihong. The family’s position also thrived. She and her husband cultivated people knowing of classical and contemporary Chinese art, developed a refined taste of things, and collected the works of other major artists, as well as classical paintings and fine art objects. They were happy to be moving around and about. During this time, she gave birth to three sons.

 

Things changed in 1937. Japan invaded China. Much of the populated areas of China were occupied. Tsen had to move to Chongqing with Wang and the evacuated government. The government split, with Chiang Kai-shek opposing Wang, and Wang resigned as president. He retired to Hanoi in French colonial Indochina, with a contingent of his supporters, including Tsen, to consider a peace offer from Japan. Away from war, the party planned a retreat of several months, and a possible journey to Europe. They rented a villa. Fan, in the safe haven of Hong Kong with the family, was invited to visit, with her oldest son. For the occasion, Wang offered the uniting couple his front master bedroom. Unbeknownst to all, the Chongqing government had been observing the villa, and an assassination team had been dispatched that night to kill Wang. Tsen was killed in the bedroom, and Fan was seriously wounded. Months later, Wang formed a new government and accepted the separate peace from Japan. Peace did not come. For China, the war went on for seven more years. The treaty might have saved the occupied China somewhat during the course of WWII, but it also turned out to be a collaborationist government. Fan recovered from her wounds, but not from the tragedy. She spent time, until the Japanese surrendered in 1945, close to the new government in Nanjing. During that period, turning away from sadness, she painted: in 1941, on an extended visit to Japan; in 1942, a summer at the northern beach resort of Beidaihe and in Beijing; and in 1943, again at Beidaihe. When the war ended, she moved to Shanghai with her family. For four years, she lived relatively quietly, with painting forays to different spots. In the fall of 1948, with the successes of the Communist army in the civil war, life in Shanghai became precarious. Fan packed up her household and moved to Hong Kong. With depleted resources and not much of a home base, she decided to migrate with her family of three sons, thirteen, fourteen and seventeen, to what she knew better: Paris.

 

Paris in the 1950s was not the Paris of the 1920s. After WWII and the German occupation, France had changed. The art world had moved on far from the academics and the post-impressionists to Yves Klein and Bernard Buffet. Settling in to a different Paris, Fan met up with some old associates and new friends, like Pan Yuliang and Zao Wou-ki, and became acquainted with writers and people who ran museums. She went to new productions of the classical plays, read the post-war works of Simone de Beauvoir and André Malraux, and, she painted: visiting Brittany, Switzerland, London, Italy and Spain. But underneath, she always missed the heart-felt connections with eastern cultures and the landscapes. In 1954, she took off for two years. First, a long stay in Japan, having several major exhibitions in Tokyo and other cities with great responses, and painted many works; then, a slow journey to Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. She painted and exhibited at every point. She returned to Paris in mid-1956, where she re-connected with her 20-year-old youngest son, Wen-ti Tsen (曾文棣), who wanted to be an artist. She accompanied him on a 2-month journey, with a stay in the Alps, a month in Florence, and a tour of the arts in northern Italy. Towards the end of the year, she moved to the U.S., where her two older sons were at school.

 

America was a new country for Fan. In time, she settled in the Boston area with her oldest son, Meng Chi Tsen (曾孟濟), who was teaching there. She found rich collections of Asian art in America: in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan in New York, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She also discovered the trove of classical Chinese and Buddhist texts conserved in the Harvard-Yenching Library. In her past, these valued treasures were often inaccessible in the conflict-ridden China, Japan or Europe. Now, she absorbed them with great intensity. As in many places she lived previously, she got close to museum curators and professors, and she also got to know some influential people in the community. She started teaching Chinese painting classes at home, which further motivated her to delve deeply into the fundamentals of Chinese painting. She acquired classical Chinese painting manuals. She looked to see and understand the works of Bada Shanren and Shi Tao. She assiduously practiced different brush strokes, the variegated densities of ink, and tested the Asian color compounds. She worked on and discarded sheets of trial sketches. She continued to paint in oil. But she applied the Chinese ways of the brush with the paint, and worked on making the insubstantiality of the negative spaces by blending multiple oil colors. In the end, though, more and more, she found the materiality of oil paint and the linen canvas to be inescapable, and what she learned at the academies to be farther away from the elusive spirituality that she wanted to attain in painting. She started to turn away more from oil-on-canvas to brush-and-ink on paper. She continued to paint and to travel: to Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Middle East, with a portfolio and a paint-box - but now, more often with a zippered travel bag of Chinese brushes and colors. 

 

In 1972, China was opened to the U.S. She took the opportunity to return at last to her spiritual home. By that time, China was at peace, easy to travel from end-to-end, and safe. She was welcomed back by some prominent officials as a returning prodigal, and was given preferential treatments to go to farms, villages and faraway art sites. She stayed for one year and did many paintings. In 1976, she went back. For a time, she caught a virus and had to stay the winter months in a room in a dormitory. She was tended by doctors and attendants, and was given traditional medicines. With nothing other to do, she painted what was on her tabletop: still lifes of medicine packs, teapots, fruits, and sundries. It was dozens of small works. She brought them home, and considered them to be among her best achievements. The year after, she took them to Hong Kong to have them properly mounted. Afterwards, retaining a few, 40-or-so of them were donated to a municipal museum in Beijing. Now, their whereabouts are uncertain.

 

For Fan, paintings, in oil or in Chinese brush, were always made with the primacy of the eye. As she honed her skills in Chinese brushworks, they still were subsumed to the keen acute seeing of the subject. She looked and painted things as she saw them. At home, they could be an array of vegetables, a sandy beach, a sleeping cat or a vase of wild flowers; traveling, they could be a spectacular mountainside, a running brook, or an unknown person at work. She was not one to cultivate herself to be the master of singular subjects, and she did not paint by rote. But, since she worked on most of these form and technique overlaps abroad, after she left China, her way of making art with actual places and lives did not reach a broad public to get a following. The ideas did not become prevalent in Chinese art until more recently with younger generations of artists, in a more liberated era. Even now, there is still a tendency to view “Chinese painting”, (國畫, guohua), as limited to conventional calligraphic brush paintings and not to see Fan’s body of work as an evolution within it. In her best works of the later periods, Fan was freed from the strictures of different conventions in space and forms. She combined observations with stacked space and freely applied unfettered brushstrokes. These works would often pass beyond looking, and into seeing the essences of objects, as a kind of Buddhist awareness of being that bypasses any categories of eastern or western art.

 

In 1983, at age 85, Fan was taken ill with cancer. She was operated on and survived. The next February, she was able to travel to Paris for a full retrospective in “Fan Tchunpi: 60 Years of Painting” at the Musée Cernuschi. Her health never quite recovered. She moved to Geneva to live with her second son Chunglu Tsen (曾仲魯), who worked at the U.N.  She died there three years later, in 1986.