Painter From Shanghai

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The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein is a historical fiction novel based on the life of Pan Yuliang, a Chinese artist born in 1899. Sold into a brothel by her opium-addicted uncle when she's 14, Yuliang learns to cope with the help of her friend and top girl at the house, Jinling. Then Jinling's violent death emphasizes that life in a brothel is always tenuous and under someone else's control. When a local official, Pan Zanhua, becomes attracted to her for her mind and not her body, he buys her freedom from the house and makes her his second wife, or concubine. But the match is clearly one of love, and Zanhua wants Yuliang to develop her mind by learning to read. Soon Yuliang discovers another passion: painting. Defying convention of the times, she is admitted to the local art school, which has created scandal by bringing in nude models to paint. Yuliang wins a scholarship that takes her first to France, then to Rome to study western painting, and she returns home with new ideas about art that don't sit well with many in Chinese society at the time. Epstein tells Yuliang's tale in this epic of a book about a woman who learns to gain control over her own fate. The Painter of Shanghai is filled with rich details of China from the early days of the 20th century into the very beginnings of the rise of communism, revealing the country's ambivalence between moving into a modern world or cleaving to the old ways. Yuliang is a strong woman who never compromises what she believes to be right, even at great cost to herself and her husband. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls in 11th grade and up. Readers should be aware of detailed scenes of life in a brothel and other sexual encounters.

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'Artists are after life's reflections, not life itself.' Jennifer Cody Epstein steps into the pantheon of fine contemporary writers with her first book THE PAINTER FROM SHANGHAI, a work of 'historical fiction' so polished in research, so rich in detail not only of the turbulent period in China during the first half of the 20th century, but also in the mysterious social customs of that country, and a source of insight into the changes in the manner in which the visual world was captured by artists as East and West met and married in the art capital of the world - Paris. Yet overriding all of this fascinating information is Epstein's gift for delivering a story of passion and love with a poetic prose style that comes together in this novel in a manner not unlike creating the painting technique that this novel's heroine describes her world. It is a grand feat and a work worth repeated readings. Westerners may not be familiar with the name Pan Yuliang, one of the more important Chinese artists who influenced the Post-Impressionist art movement, but in Epstein's eloquent novel we grow to know this gifted artist from her birth as Xiuqing in 1895, and her early years as an orphan protected by her opium-addicted uncle who sold her into a brothel at age fourteen. Enough space is allotted in this tale to allow us to learn the traditions of the 'flower houses' and the brutalities and consequences of life as a prostitute, but Epstein is careful to balance the sad with the radiant in the relationship between the newly renamed Yuliang and her beautiful 'teacher' Jinling with whom she has her first love affair, and Yuliang's subsequent rescue from the brothel through the kindness and concern showered upon her by a handsome gentleman Pan Zanhua - the man with whom she not only enters into the relationship of being his concubine, but also benefits from his support of her position as a woman and as an artist. The story spans Pan Yuliang's life from these early beginnings to her death in 1977, a life that brought her exposure to the West, with awards from the schools of art in China, Italy and France resulting in renown as a gifted artist who just happened to be a woman with a past, the many private and public pains she endured as her native country moved from the reign of the Emperors through the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek, the invasion by the Japanese, and the new order of Communism, and the influence of the world perception of art that included defeat of some of the finest artists as the battle of the sexes altered the perception of painting the nude figure as an acceptable subject matter in a climate of global turmoil. Epstein manages to write as intricately about history and Chinese tradition as well as luminously about the act of creativity. Few writers can match the descriptive language of the emergence of the visual: 'But true art must contain an emotional range that speaks to the viewer. Speaks...not by lulling them into a false sense of complacency, but by probing. Challenging. Even hurting, if need be. Anything to force us beyond life's easier thoughts.' 'Has it ever occurred to you that our wounds are what drive us to create?...What if those who've lost something compensate for it in their work? In that case the damage helps them. It's what compels them to create...And it might explain why the best artists tend to be the poorest.' THE PAINTER FROM SHANGHAI begs to become a film. But until that happens, this elegant and passionate book is one to treasure repeatedly. It is a work of art. Grady Harp