"In A SOUL HAUNTED BY PAINTING, Huang's chronological narrative makes light of Yuliang the artist, audience is none the wiser where her talent comes from, how her skill and style is nurtured and developed, her latter days in France is merely sketchily touched on. In lieu, the film is predominantly keen on showing up the injustice inflicted on her as a woman. From the horror in the bordello, she is no longer a virgo intacta (ravished by her pimp) and obliviously drugged to be sterile even before her very first client, to the wrongs piled on her after gaining fame for her paintings abroad when she is constantly at the receiving end of sexism and male chauvinism."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, please google it, thanks.

Gong Li plays Pan Yuliang one of the first Chinese women ever to be acclaimed outside China. We follow her life as she grows up, becomes a prostitute and then decides that she wants more and begins to become an artist of some renowned. In an ironic twist she ended up living much of her life in exile (hence why she was known in the West) because the Chinese didn't care for her art or her life style.

This is a very beautiful but very dull film. Its best described as a fantastic looking by the numbers biography.This isn't a bad thing but there isn't enough life to keep you watching it from start to finish. Personally I was hitting the fast forward early on and graduated to stepping through chapters of the DVD. Its not bad as such but its not very interesting (released in connection to CUNY and its TV station)

Gong Li, as Pan Yuliang, and Zhang Yimou, as "Supervisor", add their prestige to this film by woman director Huang Shuqin. It seems than many film productions have been planned in China, too many stressing the lurid brothel background of the artist.

This film dramatizes the turbulent life of Pan Yuliang (1899-1977), the first Chinese woman artist to be recognized in Europe.

Faced with the dismal future as a prostitute, Yuliang (Gong Li), a maid in a brothel, suddenly finds refuge/ happiness with well-bred/ compassionate Pan Zanhua (Er Dongsheng), a customs official. In an attempt to quell gossip he makes her his second wife. Yet, they are forced to move to Shanghai where he teaches her to read and write and introduces her to Hong, a Western style painter. She shows talent in painting nudes at the Shanghai Art Institute, until it is closed by prudish authorities.

Unable to bear a son for Zanhua, Yuliang encourages him to `return' to his first wife (Shen Hairong). She then goes to France on a government art scholarship. (She actually received top scores at the Nat'l Art School in Paris and then received a Rome scholarship.) After several years, she has gained peer recognition.

In Nanjing, Yuliang is welcomed back by Zanhua and idolized by art students as a professor of art in the National Central University. Her happiness is short-lived when her work is discredited because of her brothel background and by a China not ready for Western Art. She and Zanhua make the heart-breaking decision to separate.

Yuliang returns to Paris to remain for decades in poverty, totally devoted to art. Her culminating triumph, shared with her long-time friend Wang Shouxin (Shichang Da), was her exhibition at the prestigious Musée D'Orsay.

In a sub-plot, He Qiong (Zunxia Gao), is the artist friend in Shanghai who urges Yuliang to go with her to Paris. There, Yuliang is unable to help Qiong who is victimized by a Chinese wheeler-dealer in arts. **************************************

Her wish to have her work given to the Peoples' Republic of China was fulfilled in 1985. There have been >20 exhibitions of her work, including controversial nudes, in various cities in China and Taiwan. `She has become a household name in China'.

For the sake of art, it is "fortunate" that Pan Yuliang remained a self-exile in France. It is not likely that she and her paintings would have survived the Cultural Revolution.

Articles on Pan Yuliang and some of her distinctive paintings can be found on Internet: "Pan Yuliang".