Yanqing Pan

Yanqing Pan (Cindy) is an organic-matter-based installation artist who has exhibited across the United States as well as in Italy and China. Recent exhibitions include Cranbrook Art Museum, Forum Gallery, and Passageway Gallery in Bloomfields, Michigan, In/Out/Of in Detroit, and Ducal Chapel of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza, Italy. She has conducted lectures at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit and DeSalle Auditorium in Bloomfield Hills. Her works are in the special collections and archives of Cranbrook Academy of Art Library in Bloomfields.

The installation works of Yanqing Pan deal with the concept of post-metamorphosis, a state where nature is not defined by semiotics or associations, but rather through decay and conditions of instability. In this realm of reality, the environment becomes defined in her works through fragile reconstructions of decomposable materials, such as orange peel, fibers, wood, paper, dirt, lint, and dust. For example, she will construct a bar of soap with lint within the interior or indigo-dyed clay floating in a large tank of water. In this regard, the clay represents landmasses of continents and nations floating as islands and naturally dissolving into the water. With other works, such as Le soleil se transforme en pluie, the artist has a tendency to construct fragile installation ‘canopies’, with this piece containing cocoons which are dyed to somewhat resemble orange peel against a drip of silk organza tapestry. Such works convey notions of erosion and fragility, the finite existence of mortality. 

Because the works are so delicate and unstable, the installations are often performative in nature, meant to be appreciated in the moment. Although they are well-documented in photography, the purpose of Yanqing Pan’s art is to experience the minimalist texture and construction of her conceptual musings on life and nature, outside the institutionalization of classification and categorization. In terms of her process, the materials are repetitively scattered, soaked, knotted, suspended, fed into dye baths, grinding organic matter, or deconstructing objects. As a result, these substances undergo a philosophical transformation into forms of traces or fragments which represent the purity and essence of life and the environment. In such a regard, Yanqing Pan practice is very much fluxus in nature of not only emphasizing the artistic process, but also conveying conceptual activity as a living theory, an embodiment which challenges our cognitive notions. 

Feuille (pictured above) is one of Yanqing Pan’s most fascinating installations from a metaphorical and symbolic point of view. In the gallery within the photograph, we will find a ‘canopy’ of pale deciduous tree limbs which have books and pages as extension of ‘leaves’. The decaying and aged nature of the books along with the fragile nature of the branches entices a harrowing morbidity of horror and lingering death, especially considering the ‘decomposed’ nature of the presentation. 

A conceptual muse, Yanqing Pan combines philosophy with image-making. Her fluxus, minimalist approach to art combined with her personal anecdotes on the purpose of life and nature against institutionalized frame-work, reveals a dimensionality based in a state of self-awareness and expanded consciousness. Yanqing Pan implores the viewer to discover a sixth sense when interacting with organic substances and materials, elements and evidence of nature outside the confines of time. Like the impact of erosion, the art of Yanqing Pan behaves as an unrelenting force of defining the purpose and essence of nature.

https://www.yanqingpan.com