Pan Tianshou (1897-1971) is considered one of the four giants in traditional Chinese painting, along with Wu Changshuo, Huang Binhong and Qi Baishi, and art fans can examine Pan's work on show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art from now until February 5.
Entitled 'Revitalising the Glorious Tradition: The Retrospective Exhibition of Pan Tianshou's Art', the show presents 36 representative works from the Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum in Hangzhou, including landscape, flower and bird paintings, calligraphy, and some valuable documents of one of the founders in teaching modern Chinese painting.
Visitors can also explore Pan's artistic career from his early works, including Bamboo, and also his landscape paintings based on Wu Changshuo's style.
The exhibition also features Pan's well-known finger paintings of vultures and lotus plants, and large-scale masterpieces such as Transporting Iron Ore by Sailboat, Buffalo in a Summer Pond and The Almighty Gaze.
He was also known for assimilating the eccentric styles of the ancient masters, introducing the seal and clerical scripts into painting, and also combined the components of landscape painting with flower and bird painting. As a result, Pan developed a unique style that is characterised by expressive brushwork, vigorous form, forceful composition and monumental scale.
Hong Kong Museum of Art's chief curator Tang Hoi-chiu explains that since Pan was a child, he had a keen interest in painting and he was determined to work hard at it by copying The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a famous how-to book on Chinese painting compiled in the early Qing dynasty. Pan later studied at Zhejiang First Normal College in Hangzhou.