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Fang Junbi 方君璧
(1898-1986)

Hailing from a large and wealthy Fuzhou family, and a younger sister to two anti-Qing revolutionaries, Fang Junbi traveled to Europe at the tender age of fourteen. While she spent most of the next eighteen years of her life there, Fang attended the Académie Julian in Paris, the École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris; exhibited with the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and the Salon de Tuileries; and met and married her husband, Zeng Zhongming 曾仲鳴 (1896-1939).

Even before her return to China in 1930, Fang began establishing her professional reputation there with several biographic profiles and artwork reproductions in the Republican periodical press. Despite giving birth to three sons in quick succession in the early 1930s, she maintained an active career as an artist; popular pictorials regularly featured her artworks and she commercially published albums of her paintings in 1932 and 1938. In 1939, Fang was gravely injured, and her husband killed, in a botched assassination attempt on Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883-1944), a close family friend and her husband’s employer. Following her husband’s death, Fang reenergized her career and staged multiple art exhibitions in China and in Japan for charitable causes and in support of Wang Jingwei’s Reorganized National Government of China, a puppet state of the Japanese occupation. After the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover in 1949, Fang fled overseas with her sons, thereafter, traveling widely and staging painting exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and the United States.