High & Low

Yangyang Pan is widely recognized for her gestural abstract paintings primarily focused on the contrasts found in nature. Her expressive visual language takes inspiration from her physical surroundings and personal memories, fusing it with spirit and spontaneity sourced from emotions within. Her palette is chromatically saturated in a higher key, which delights the senses and adds drama to the composition.

Pan’s love of flowers and gardens is central to her work; however, they are a means to an end. For Pan, flowers, gardens, nature are bound up with action painting, and the freedom she finds through artmaking - she names Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, among others, as influences. Thus, some paintings border on recognizable “pretty” bouquets, while others appear wild, aggressive, and totally abstract. Pan’s ab-ex style is simply a reflection of her personal journey, beginning in traditional Chinese art training from age 6, to her move West, where she was exposed to Western abstraction in depth.

Yangyang Pan (born 1976) studied at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute. Graduating with honors, Pan received her Bachelor of Arts in 1998 followed by a Master of Fine Art in 2002. She remained as an instructor until 2006 when she relocated to Canada. Since 2006, Pan exhibited internationally, including Canada, USA, Italy, and China, including 5 solo exhibitions at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art in New York. She received the Ontario Arts Council, Visual Artists Creation Projects Grant in 2020 and was awarded the Ontario Arts Council, Exhibition assistant award both in 2010 and 2019. In 2015, she completed a commission for Apple, where her work was displayed as the façade of a new Apple store in China. Her work is widely collected in numerous private and public institutions such as Government of Ontario Art Collection, Apple (USA), Royal Elite International Academy (Canada), The Rochester Museum of Fine Art (USA), The Sichuan Fine Art Institute (China) and retail giants including Holt Renfrew (Canada), Anthropologie (USA), Amour Vert (USA), Vdara Las Vegas, and Provide Commerce (USA).