“People call me Pan. I am originally from Shanghai. I mainly work with ink and paper. I think this most fundamental material, or most humble material, can deliver probably most meaningful images. Basically I don’t have this idea of a piece of canvas. The daily life is like a piece of paper. It’s going on, again and again and again, like everyday life, and so, it’s a huge paper, actually. What I have to do is to create a certain kind of… sometimes I call it reason, and sometimes I create a kind of situation to create something people call art. So I don’t really paint anything; I use ink and paper, I only paint the background. So I’m a background painter. Like I said I try to create a kind of situation, allow an image to grow from the paper, from the ink.

So you create an image from the void. Every time when I start to… sort of paint, I have to make sure I have a void mind. So I have to empty my mind. It’s a whole life process. It’s a little bit like the Buddhist idea of suffering. So I try to suffer less by trying to understand the suffering through artwork.

Our artistic training started from my earlier childhood calligraphy practicing. So we grew up in this kind of image bank, which… actually it’s characters. So every Chinese character, can be seen as an image, or picture. There are lots of symbolic meanings behind our different images in this world, from our standing. Every element is this world carries a certain kind of message, and this message can be illustrated as a character. And the character is an image so image is a universal language. That is why I guess I can survive in the West. 

If I have a life mission, it is to destroy this square of the character. So I want to destroy the structure of this language and try to bring this writing, the calligraphical technique, to a visual world, to the contemporary art field, for example.” –Pan Jianfeng

Shop: Pan Jianfeng’s Works

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