“I see artwork as a kind of score—like a piece of music or theatre—that only comes fully into being when encountered. When I release a work into the world, it no longer resides in the space where it is installed; instead, it unfolds in the viewer’s perception, in relation to the surrounding environment, and within the quiet architecture of memory and thought.”

As Anya Gallaccio's "preserve" unfolded at Turner Contemporary this last January, with its monumental felled ash tree slowly decomposing across gallery floors, the art world finds itself increasingly drawn to works that embrace their own dissolution. But one of the most important aspects of Gallaccio's ephemeral installations—featuring melting candles, ageing fruit, and decomposing flowers—is to speak of a much larger cultural movement, where art is no longer meant to be an object of adoration but a moment of reflection on permanence and connection, where something can only be felt, not owned.

Within this rising wave of material acknowledgement, Yanqing Pan's practice emerges, a quieter voice of impermanence, where decay is not held as a spectacle but as a meditation on collaboration and co-authorship between creator, viewer and material. The dramatic transformation of a monumental falling or the theatrical melting of Gallaccio’s artworks stands opposite Pan's works, who whisper: orange peel powder oxidising in corridor corners, indigo slowly fading from wooden forms. Her practice suggests a radical act of impermanence, a cultural shift that does not rely on monumentalising entropy but lets it happen without fanfare – art that does not crave attention to its disappearance but simply holds the truth that nothing is permanent, lessening the grip on a societal vassalage to consumerism and capitalism.

Pan’s recent project Avant l'Orange—a piece that exists somewhere between a publication and an artwork—is both a fleeting material presence and artist's intention. For instance, there are no linear images or texts – the work simply asks to be encountered, as it may rest in a corner, almost indistinguishable from dust, until scent and texture betray its presence - a presence that "stains" and "fades into the environment like a trace". In this work, the artist relies on materials that resist permanence, that carry at the same time, a heavy but almost indetectable scent, time and decay, and a clarity that comes from the simple act of existing. Where once there was a fruit, now there is only powder, existing in what the artist calls the “liminal space between vitality and disappearance”. This in-between space is the foundation of this artwork, reflecting the artist's inquiry into how materials, in their most fragile state, can embody and emanate perception and time—a vivid call on our connection, or rather disconnection, with the non-human world.

“In many ways, Avant l’Orange is not about orange peel at all, but about the act of sensing, of dwelling alongside a material that is constantly becoming something else. It invites a slower, more embodied engagement—one that resists interpretation and instead calls for co-existence,” the artist explains.

Growing up in Beijing, a city in constant flux, Pan absorbed the rhythms of transformation, developing a heightened sensitivity to impermanence and material change. She further developed her practice when moving across continents, where a different atmosphere led to a deepened awareness of what it means “to dwell between places, cultures, and languages”. These influences clearly embody her conceptual and material choices, where presence itself is more powerful than preconceived narratives. Her installations often function as interventions, recalling the material investigations of Michel Blazy and the spatial poetics of Tatiana Trouvé, while carrying distinct cultural resonances that privilege sensation over explanation (and, notably, creating works that don’t announce themselves but rather inhabit liminal spaces).

In an era of accelerated consumption and digital mediation, Pan's practice offers something like a mirage—permission to wonder, to enquire into the unknown and allow space for new ideas and interpretations to emerge through sensorial encounters rather than intellectual connections. Her upcoming body of work, "non-works" and "silent workshops", promises to further explore these realms of uncertainty and divergence.

Pan's body of work is an act of quiet resistance to what we consider art and how we perceive materials and encounters, a resistance through subtraction. This art doesn't declare -I am here; it rather cultivates a playground for different modules of attention, where the need for constant interpretation is left at the door, and it simply asks us to be present, as everything is a vulnerable, feeling and quite metamorphosis.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image

Cendres vertes. Wood, Indigo from Vat by Yanqing Pan.

All images courtesy of Yanqing Pan.