Yihan Pan

About

Yihan Pan (b. 2002, Beijing) is a visual artist based in London.

She studied BA in Interactive Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and MA Photography at the Royal College of Art (RCA).

Working with microscopes and telescopes, her practice explores material transformation through fleeting states of dust, water, and light. Working across macro and microscopic scales, she examines how ephemeral forms carry traces of time and transformation. Often working through processes of observation and resonance to her subjects, her practice examines the tension between permanence and dissolution.

Her work explores the fragile boundaries between measurement and collapse, visibility and disappearance, presence and withdrawal. she use light, water, and dust, materials that seem weightless yet carry the silent gravity of time and existence.

“At night, I found myself beside the swan pond in the heavy rain and saw the water on the on the swan’s surface rolling and changing. The world became unnamable again.” -Yihan

 

The work “Ten Thousand Drops of Rain” takes rain drops as its object of study, Yihan focus on water drops as fragile units of measurement. Captured through high-speed photography and microscopic lenses, they form a rhythm: one drop, two, eight, ten…until It rains, counting itself fails and dissolves into pure phenomenon. Through the microscope, she trace a single drop resting delicately on the surface of a swan’s feather, a microcosm of fragility, balance, and fleeting presence.

One begets two, two begets three, and three begets all things. But where philosophy imagines expansion, she observe disappearance: the more we try to measure the world, the more it escapes our grasp.

Her practice draws on the writings of Francis Ponge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, who each sought meaning in small, overlooked things. Like them, I do not wish to conquer the world through measurement, but to accompany its fragility, to present the lightness that endures beneath the world’s surface weight.