page_title: Guan Zilan
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Guan Zilan / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Guan Zilan on the cover of 良友 [Liángyǒu] magazine #45. Magazine also had alternate title in English, The Young Companion."
context_page_description: Guan Zilan, also known as Violet Kwan, was a Chinese avant-garde painter. She was one of the first artists to introduce Fauvism to China, and was known for applying Western painting style to Chinese traditional subjects. Her most famous work is Portrait of Miss L. Although an art world favorite during the late 1920s and the 1930s, she stopped painting after the onset of the Cultural Revolution and became mostly forgotten in Communist China.
context_section_description: Guan was born in Shanghai in 1903, during the tumultuous late Qing dynasty. She was of Nanhai, Guangdong ancestry. Her parents, who were successful textile merchants involved in textile design, gave her an artistic education from a young age. She studied painting at Shanghai Shenzhou Girls' School and later Western painting at China Art University (中華藝術大學) in Shanghai, where she was taught by the well known painters Chen Baoyi (陳抱一) and Hong Ye (洪野).
  After her graduation in 1927, she followed Chen's advice and went to Japan to further her studies. She enrolled at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo, and her style became strongly influenced by Henri Matisse's Fauvism. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Chinese women who had successful careers in Japan attracted significant attention from Japanese media. Guan made headlines as a representative of the "modern girl" and was projected as a model beauty.
  Guan returned to Shanghai in 1930, and became one of the first artists to bring Fauvism to China. She and her fellow female painter Pan Yuliang became favourites in the art world of the young Republic of China (1912–49). Women artists trained in Western style, such as Guan and Pan, captured the fascination of the public, and were accepted as the embodiment of modernity. Her paintings and portraits were repeatedly published in the popular magazine Liangyou (The Young Companion). She debuted in the magazine in 1927, when it published works selected from her graduation exhibition at China Art University. In 1930, when Guan held a solo exhibition in Shanghai, Liangyou dedicated a full page to her paintings from the exhibition. A photograph of her playing the mandolin was chosen for the magazine's cover.
caption: Guan Zilan on the cover of The Young Companion, c. 1929
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