Pan’s Classical Figure Studies Turn Trans Visibility Into Form
Pan’s work begins with an image that has traveled for centuries: Sleeping Hermaphroditus, the life-size marble Roman copy of an ancient Greek bronze from the 2nd century C.E. In Pan’s hands, that classical figure becomes something more unsettled than a citation. It becomes a way to think about how trans bodies are seen, framed, and made into spectacle.
The artist shows a series of smaller canvases that vary the same subject, but the most arresting work is the one that places the reclining sculpture in relation to the legs of spectators behind it. That detail matters. It shifts the image from art history into the social field of looking, where the body is never simply itself but always being interpreted by someone else.
Pan’s reading of Hermaphroditus is rooted in that tension. The mythic figure, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, has long occupied a charged place in Western visual culture. Pan treats that legacy not as a curiosity, but as a structure of perception. The work makes visible the discomfort and irony of being rendered legible through a cis gaze, as if trans existence were an exception rather than a fact.
The artist’s process is as distinctive as the subject. Pan invented a duotone method that begins with ink and water mixed on a flat surface, usually the studio floor. A primed canvas is suspended above it, with a transparent film carrying the image placed on top, and heat lamps positioned overhead. Over the course of an hour or two, the image forms as the heat evaporates the mixture.
Pan developed the method to create a situation in which she is not entirely in control. That surrender, however, is paired with autonomy. The materials are inexpensive, easy to source, and do not require collaborators. The process is also sensitive to temperature and humidity, which means experience becomes part of the work’s structure. The result is a surface that feels both carefully made and slightly contingent, as if it has arrived rather than been forced.
Pan has also made works based on her own body, including one made by lying in the pose for more than an hour while the image formed. That was before she transitioned. Since then, she has abandoned the durational performance aspect of the process. What remains is a practice that joins classical reference, bodily memory, and a handmade image system with unusual precision.
In Pan’s work, the ancient and the contemporary do not sit apart. They meet in the act of being seen — and in the refusal to let that act remain neutral.
