Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present Revelation, a solo exhibition by Chinese female artist Pang Tao (b. 1934), featuring a selection of paintings from the 1970s to the present. Although Pang was one of the earliest artists in modern China to explore abstract painting, she has been largely ignored by Chinese modern and contemporary art history. This show aims to illuminate Pang’s original artistic experimentations in the historical context of Chinese contemporary art.

Pang Tao is the daughter of Pang Xunqin and Qiu Ti, two important members of the early Chinese avant-garde art group the Storm Society (Jue Lan She), which was formed in the 1930s. The artistic life of Pang had long been nourished by her parents as well as the generation of artists from before 1949, who were devoted to modern art since the beginning of the 20th century. In her later formative years, Pang worked as an independent artist and an educator in academia from the 1950s to 1970s, a period marked by the Cultural Revolution. Not interested in engaging with politics, Pang was discounted as academic and conservative, and her works did not spark much critical debate within the binary categorization 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.