Yanqing Pan
- Anna Lilli Garai
- May 27
- 6 min read
Yanqing Pan works with materials that carry memory—dust, cotton, orange peel, and indigo. She starts with what draws her in, then listens to how each material moves and changes over time. Her pieces hold space for quiet perception. Presence matters more than form. Growing up between nature and city life in Beijing shaped how she sees the world: in small shifts, in what’s overlooked. Her work feels grounded and slow, shaped by attention rather than intention. What stays with you is not a single image, but a shift in how you notice the world around you.
Q: When did you start feeling like images say more for you than words?
A: This was a slow realization, not a sudden shift. At first, I loved words—I believed in their power to explain, to carry the weight of experience. But over time, I began to notice subtle fractures: how language, especially when it crosses linguistic boundaries, can flatten what it tries to describe. Illustration became a space where feeling could escape the rigidity of grammar.
Later, working with fibers, dust, and organic materials, I understood that it wasn’t even about the image anymore—it was about presence, texture, and time. Visual language offered me a space to hold what words always seemed too rigid to contain. It’s not about “expressing more” or “not needing to express at all.”
Maybe it’s because of my background—Chinese, after all, is a language born from images. I began to rediscover some words whose beauty I had long overlooked, dulled by habitual use. I think my work, "Man from crowd" became, unknowingly, one such experiment. The words merge with the image, the meaning, and the people within.
Q: How do materials find their way into your work? Do you plan it or just follow what feels right?
A: I don’t feel that materials are simply integrated into my work—rather, I enter into dialogue with them. Materials have their own time, their own logic. I try not to impose meaning on them—I listen. Sometimes it starts with a small obsession: the softness of cotton wool, the way orange peel powder carries scent and memory, how indigo breathes as it oxidizes.
These materials teach me about slowness, transformation, and impermanence. I follow what first resonates in the body. Planning is just an initial framework, but the work always transcends it—through touch, accident, and time.
Q: What does presence mean to you—when you're making something or just looking at it?
A: In this world saturated with images, the image is no longer a way of seeing the world—it has become a tool: manufactured, consumed, and circulated. People are hijacked by “image-behavior,” driven by the desire to be seen. Even artworks are reduced to visual outcomes, simplified for circulation. The image keeps speaking, yet drifts ever further from real perception.
But what I understand as “presence” is never about spectacle or being gazed upon. It is what unfolds quietly, subtly, yet stubbornly. A scattering of orange peel powder, the slow oxidation of indigo—these things, in their gentlest form, quietly reshape the relationship between space and the body.
“Presence,” to me, is a perceptual experience that resists naming, resists containment. It is not a finished state of an object, but a process in motion—where material, time, air, light, and viewer continuously interact and shift. It refuses immediate definition. It refuses to be consumed as a visual product. In this, materials have taught me a kind of honesty more direct than any image.
What I seek has never been about the image being “seen,” but about that moment of quiet encounter between the viewer, the work, and the space—a slow perception, a silent co-existence.
When I create, “presence” is the sensitive connection between body, material, and space. It’s not about controlling the material, but listening to its texture, its weight, sensing its subtle interactions with air and time. It is a quiet yet tension-filled process—one that draws my attention back to every detail of the present: the touch of fingertips, the rhythm of breath, the material’s own transformations. In that moment, I am not “making” the work. I am simply “with” the material.
When I encounter a piece, presence arrives as a slight disturbance—not something that pulls me in with force, but something that quietly shifts my relation to space. I am no longer just a “viewer,” but someone coexisting with that presence.
I have always believed that the most powerful form of presence is not visual impact, but those quiet sensations that persist—soft yet unshakable. They alter the way you breathe in that moment. They quietly change your relationship to the world.
So when images become illusions of actions, I choose to stay with time, with dust, with breath.
Q: Has growing up in Beijing shaped the way you think about nature in your work?
A: Of course. Beijing is a city of contradictions—ancient yet modern, densely packed yet endlessly expanding. Growing up, I always felt a tension, a distance between nature and the city. I lived near my school in the city center during the week, and on weekends, I would return to my home with a courtyard, bordered by a forest.
Looking back, I’m not sure if I longed more for the days away from school or for the presence of nature itself. But that very distance, that desire, sharpened my sensitivity to nature’s most fragile traces: a patch of moss breaking through the concrete floor, dust blown by the wind, or the shimmer of rust in decay.
In my works, I don’t attempt to reconstruct “nature” as an image. Instead, I participate in its process—decay, metamorphosis, and quiet persistence. At the same time, that distance has made me a bit of an idealist. If nature exists in the heart, then perhaps nature is wherever that presence is felt.
Q: What changed for you when you started leaning into quiet instead of storytelling?
A: Integrating into silence is like learning to breathe differently. Storytelling often demands structure, clarity, and answers. But silence welcomes ambiguity and allows things to unfold at their own pace.
When I embrace silence, my work is no longer just about conveying information, but more about creating perceptual space. I think this is a change in my attitude toward my work and the audience—from explanation to permission: letting the material speak, so that the viewer does not have to understand immediately, and allowing the work to exist without conclusion.
This has not only changed my art, but also my relationship with the world—I am more focused, more patient, and no longer in a hurry to define. Perhaps this is also a kind of narrative.
Q: How do you decide when something’s done, especially if it’s made to fade or fall apart?
A: If I have to say, I don’t believe in a final, completed state. Or rather, “completion” is not a fixed moment. For me, it is more about knowing when to step back and when to let go. In a sense, a work is “complete” when it no longer needs my hand—when it begins its own transformation into life. “Completion” is the achievement of a relationship, not the freezing of a form.
When I work with materials that are destined to fade, decompose, or pass away over time, I know from the beginning that the work will never be still. After all, everything is always in motion—because with thermal motion, movement is absolute, and stillness is only relative.
So the question is not “Is it finished?” but “Is it ready to continue to exist without me?”
I think my role is temporary—I guide the material into a certain state. Completion is not an act of control, but a step back. It is about recognizing when the work has reached a stage where it can continue to form without my intervention. Like a life that begins to choose its own nourishment once the mother’s body no longer feeds it, it enters the world on its own terms.
In this way, “decomposition” is not the end, but part of the life of the work.
Decay is not failure.
Disappearance is not loss.
They are processes of existing in different ways.
Therefore, I don’t decide when something is finished in the traditional sense. I just recognize when it’s time to let go. That’s when the work doesn’t belong to me—I belong to the work.
