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Picture imperfect

By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-18 11:04

Pan Shixun stands beside his painting We Walk on the Broad Road, displayed at the National Art Museum of China.

Pan Shixun has lost count of the number of times he has been to Tibet. Except for Ngari in the region's western part and Medog in the southeastern part, the 75-year-old painter has left his footprints on almost every inch of the plateau.

Pan remembers his first visit to the region in 1960 as a student of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He never thought his half-a-year stay then would inspire his lifelong pursuit of portraying the land closest to the gods with his brush, and sow the seeds of his "Tibet complex".

"When it comes to Tibet, I'm always overcome with guilt because I have never been able to express what I have felt for the land and its people to the fullest," says the silver-haired painter. "This is what drives me to Tibet again and again."

Pan is among 139 painters whose works are currently on display at the National Art Museum of China. Titled Inspiration from Plateau - Chinese Fine Arts Exhibition, the exhibition is the largest to date on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and will last through Nov 30.

The 345 paintings, spanning the past 60 years, feature the dramatic changes that have occurred in the region before and after its peaceful liberation in 1951.

Standing in front of his 1964 work, We Walk on the Broad Road, Pan says he feels "lucky to have been a witness to Tibet's sea change". The painting shows a group of Tibetan road builders in high spirits, walking, talking, and laughing.

Pan also recalls vividly an elderly Tibetan woman he ran into in 1960. He wanted to sketch her weather-beaten looks and tried to get her to smile.

To his surprise, he found the woman had actually forgotten how to smile, from long years of suffering.

When Pan went to Tibet for the second time in 1963, he saw a different people. Once he became acquainted with them, the locals would even light-heartedly pat him on the back and share a joke.

Tibetans, says Pan, are sometimes seen as mysterious, rough and barbaric, going by their appearance, habits and customs. Such perceptions arise out of unfamiliarity, says the painter.

"They are a people shaped by their harsh living conditions. They have to be what they are in order to survive," he explains.

"In fact, they are simple and honest, and very much like farmers in the northern hinterland.

"I've been trying hard to make this formidable yet sublime land and its heroic and affable people known to the outside world."

Pan says he has been most impressed by the heroism and optimism of the Tibetan herdsmen. He can never forget what he saw in a remote village blanketed by a heavy snowfall in Markam county, Sichuan province, in 1980.

"Their already tough living conditions were made worse by the snow. They had lost their livestock and suffered from acute hunger. But they continued to sing and dance, as if nothing had happened," Pan says. Such equanimity in the face of deprivation is something he will always remember, says Pan.

His devotion to Tibet wavered just once - in the mid-1980s. He was then in France for 17 months and many of his peers had turned to the more trendy style of abstract expressionism.

To follow suit would have meant to give up his realistic approach to portraying Tibet. As Pan mulled his options, he realized that Tibet had become an integral part of his life.

In 2004, despite opposition from family and friends who feared for his physical safety, 70-year-old Pan undertook yet another journey to Tibet and produced Two Pastoral Girls.

"Earlier, there were simply no schools in these pastoral areas," Pan says, "but now these two girls were ready to graduate from college and one was even preparing for her post-graduate studies."

For Pan, Tibet is much more than the 10,000 odd sketches he has made over the past 50 years. It is a calling from the heart.