Pan Jian's paintings demonstrate a relationship between the image and the textual references behind the work; they are released from a singular monologue of emotions and placed in a broader social context. When treating the subject, Pan keeps his distance and invites spontaneity; the viewer’s attention naturally moves towards the mysterious light, and one cannot help being enchanted by the metaphorical world behind the image. The artist almost positions himself as an on-looker, as the source of the light remains unknown. The paintings incite the question: when we retreat from reality and immerse ourselves in the painting, where should we go from here, how do we return?

What the paintings describe are beyond the scenery of daily life; they are not simply representations of natural landscapes. In Pan's artworks, we observe the repetitive process of construction and destruction, between which the artist painstakingly maintains a delicate balance. On the one hand, he intends to keep the images somewhat realistic in order to play on the viewer’s conscious response through visual perception; on the other, his employment of rhetorical languages keeps reminding us of the gap between what we have seen and what really exists. The use of abstraction simplifies the ordinary scenes into a mystifying ghost-like existence whilst the foreground darkness in many of the pieces in this series is contrasted with the unnatural glow of light in the background, creating a play between illusion and reality.
-Jessie Xie