Dancing Notes, an exhibition at Beijing's Inside-Out Art Museum, traces Pang Tao's artistic evolution by showing her works dating from the 1940s to more recent years that transform from a figurative style to an abstract approach over time. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Two still lifes that Pang Tao painted in her teens are being shown at Dancing Notes, from which one can recognize a natural painter with a sense of color.

Besides good artistic taste, more importantly, Pang Tao's parents implanted in her a disposition to improve through change.

In the late 1920s, Pang Xunqin attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, an art school well known for leading students to break away from strict academic conventions and think independently and create freely. He co-founded Juelan She, a vanguard art society in Shanghai, in 1932. Members sought to revive Chinese art by developing oil painting.

Qiu joined after returning from Japan a year later.

Pang Tao's attempts with abstraction did not fully take off until the 1980s, when Chinese art circles started to shift from socialist realism to a variety of contemporary approaches.

Lu Yinghua, director of the Inside-Out Art Museum, says Pang Tao is an "outstanding artist of her generation"-her explorations in the 1980s led to changes in the composition, color schemes and mediums of Chinese art.

Pang Tao's reinterpretations of natural landscapes freed the audience from the established viewing of familiar scenery, providing imaginative experiences. For example, her works in the early 1980s depict Xiangbi Mountain, a landmark riverside attraction in Guilin in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, which is named for its physical resemblance of an elephant's trunk. She skips detailing the landscape that surrounds the mountain and highlights its geometrical structure and rough texture by adding sand to the oil paint.

Some of these works are on show in a series titled Travels in Lijiang.