It would be quite accurate to judge this book by its cover: a tasteful if generic depiction of blossoms and sampans, along with a sticker announcing 'If you liked Memoirs Of A Geisha, you'll love this'.

Like the 1997 bestseller by Arthur Golden, this is a debut novel written by a Western author who has no first-hand experience of the Eastern culture being written about.

Also like Memoirs, this is a painstakingly researched novel by a sensitive writer who succeeds in making the reader empathise with, rather than exoticise, the characters and their world.

Based on the life of 20th-century Chinese painter Pan Yuliang, American author Jennifer Cody Epstein did not have to do a lot of embellishing when it came to giving her protagonist an eventful life.

Born in 1895 as Yang Xiuqing and orphaned at a young age, Pan would become a prostitute, a concubine and an artist known for her Western-influenced self-portraits, before dying alone in Paris in 1977.

In the novel, we follow Pan as she is sold at the age of 14 by her opium-addict uncle to be a prostitute at the grandiosely named Hall of Eternal Splendour in Wuhu. Renamed Yuliang, her life selling her body is regimented and grim.

Her trauma is eased somewhat through her friendship with the establishment's 'top girl', Jinling, whose beauty is glamorously aided by the eating of crushed seed pearls. It is Jinling's mutilation and murder, just when she had saved enough money to buy her freedom, which is depicted as the heartbreak at the core of Pan's life and art.

Unlike her friend, Pan is freed after seven years when she meets a handsome and progressive official who is impressed by her knowledge of Chinese poetry and her obvious intelligence.

In a sweet but romanticised love story, he buys her as his concubine for the most noble of reasons - he is reluctant to take advantage of her as a prostitute sent to him as a 'gift' by his business contacts, but she tells him that she will be beaten if she returns to the brothel without having 'finished the job'.

Not only does he physically free her from the brothel as well as from her bound feet, but he also moves her to cosmopolitan Shanghai, teaches her to read and write and encourages her to pursue her interest in painting.

She becomes one of a handful of women accepted into the Shanghai Art School. However, her true artistic awakening, ironically or appropriately, comes about when she starts painting herself nude: 'And for the first time in years, she truly sees herself. She sees herself as finally free of the white ant's probing fingers, of strange men's hands. Of jewellery that binds it, chainlike, to debt...'

Other artists, Chinese and foreign, are impressed with her work; not so much the public. Comparisons to whores ensue. There is further drama in how being true to herself compromises the professional standing of her greatest supporter, her husband. Meanwhile, her search for identity is set against the backdrop of modern China's own turbulent coming-of-age.

This book, while a page-turner in its own right, might actually work better as a film - indeed, Pan's story was made into a 1994 movie starring Gong Li - due to the visual nature of painting and the dramatic but relatively uncomplex nature of many of the characters and emotions.

But it is also a thoughtful meditation on what it is to be an artist. Early on in the book, Pan's uncle says of the poet Li Bai, who, legend has it, drowned while trying to embrace the moon's reflection: 'Artists aren't interested in sense. They're interested in the senses... They're after life's reflections, not life itself.'

Pan's story is about how the chasing of one gives meaning to the other.

If you like this read: Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden (1997, $18.14 with GST, Books Kinokuniya) This first-person narrative tells the story of the life of a fictional geisha in early 20th-century Kyoto.

THE PAINTER OF SHANGHAI
By Jennifer Cody Epstein
Penguin Books/ Paperback/486 pages/ $16.50 (before GST)/ Major bookstores
*** 1/2

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on July 20, 2008.