Pang Jiun was born to an artistic family in Shanghai on August 8, 1936. His father, Pang Xunqin, had earlier studied oil painting in France, and after returning to China, he and Ni Yide together founded the Storm Society (Juelanshe), a modern art group. He devoted his whole career to arts and crafts education. Pang Jiun’s mother, Qiu Di, brimmed with talent and had studied oil painting in Tokyo. Both of his parents were renowned in China’s modern art community for their oil painting. Through his parents, Pang Jiun was steeped in art from an early age. In 1948, when he was only twelve years old, he first displayed his talents together with his older sister, Pang Dao, at a joint oil painting exhibition in Guangzhou (Canton). This attracted much attention in the print media. In the following year, when he was admitted to the National College of Art in Hangzhou, he became the youngest university student. In early 1953, he transferred to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he studied under masters such as Xu Beihong and Wu Zuoren and received solid training in the French academic style. After graduating in 1954, he worked as a creative artist for Beijing Fine Arts Co. and then Beijing Fine Art Academy.
From 1954 to 1980, his works were selected many times for inclusion in the Beijing Municipal Fine Art Exhibition and the National Fine Art Exhibition. His famous The Worksite Laundry Group, shown in the “Beijing Municipal Fine Art Exhibition Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” in 1959, is now in the collection of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. In 1978, Pang Jiun, Yan Zhenduo, and others organized a small “Exhibition of Scenic Paintings,” which was the first non-official exhibition in China after 1949. In the following year, the “New Year Art Exhibition” was even larger and attracted people from all walks of life. It touched off a wave of non-official activities in the arts world by groups such as the Beijing Oil Painting Society and the Stars Art Group.
In 1980, he moved to Hong Kong and started teaching courses in drawing, watercolor, and oil painting at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist College. In 1987, he and his wife and daughter settled in Taiwan, and he taught at National Taiwan Academy of Arts (present-day National Taiwan University of Arts, NTUA). During this period, he cultivated innumerable talented young people and wrote four books on oil painting techniques. Since retiring from NTUA in 2007, he has continued to paint without interruption, so his painting career by now spans more than 70 years.
Pang Jun’s oil paintings blend Chinese and Western styles. Apart from his firm foundation in French academic drawing technique and the unrestrained palette of the Impressionist and Fauvist artists, at heart he is more dedicated to the creation of Chinese-style oil painting. In his early years, as a result of his extensive traveling throughout northern and southern China in order to do scenic painting, he became aware of the endlessly fluid transformations of gray shadings through close observation of mountain mists. Through the physical practice of completing one after another work, he refined his oil painting techniques to capture the poetic beauty of China’s landscape, so that he finally pioneered new approaches in Eastern oil painting for “sketching the idea.”
