The Weight of Water and Dust: Yihan Pan’s Poetics of Disappearance

The first time I saw Yihan Pan’s photographs, I didn’t think of rain or dust, I thought of glasswork; something fragile in its transparency and cold in its precision. As a visual artist with a background in interactive design and photography, she uses high-speed photography, microscopic observation, and digital coding to inhabit delicate moments in time. Her images carry a sense of fleeting ambiguity and quiet beauty that questions our perception of scale and the very act of capturing the world.

Her fascination with natural forms and the sublime meets the cold precision of image-making. When technology magnifies and freezes a moment in time, does it bring us closer to a deeper truth, or does it create a new, hyperreal sublime that distances us from it?

Ten Thousand Drops of Rain, Yihan Pan, 2025, digital print on Hahnemühle Rag Paper, 40 × 100 cm

“At night, I found myself beside the swan pond in the heavy rain and saw the water on the swan's surface rolling and changing. The world became unnamable again.” -Yihan Pan

It is this moment that her photographs return to. In one large print, the swans appear almost consumed by the storm, their white forms dissolving into the rhythm of rain. The image feels painterly, but there is no centre, everything trembles at the edge of disappearance.

A Drop on a Swan, Yihan Pan, 2025, analogue microscope photography, inkjet on Kozo paper

Ten Thousand Drops of Rain, Provisional We, Handbag Factory, London, UK, 2025, curated by Noor Albar and Hyunwoo Lim.

Another component of the work isolates individual raindrops against plain, empty backgrounds. Pan uses the camera’s high-speed and macro capability to suspend what the naked eye cannot: near-perfect spheres, droplets touching and separating mid-air, and their precise points of impact. These images are strikingly beautiful, yet their technical perfection feels almost violent—as if motion has been forced to a halt. “It’s like the camera wants to erase the fall itself,” she notes. The work recalls Francis Ponge’s quiet observations of the everyday, but here the act of looking becomes mechanical, almost surgical—tender and incisive at once.

In this “magical world of imagery,” Pan’s practice also converses with Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic universe: a combinatory system in which each photograph is a throw in an ongoing game of possibilities, permanently displacing another in a state of flux.

Raindrops on a Swan, Yihan Pan, 2025, I Saw It All Around Me, Greatorex Street Gallery, London, UK, curated by Robyn Graham

Her approach to “lightness” is another layer to this inquiry. It aligns with Italo Calvino’s definition, lightness is not vagueness, but a quality of precision and intent. This definition takes physical form in her installations, images printed on Kozo paper rest on blocks of calcite and selenite, fleeting images anchored to matter that has endured for centuries. A surface that once captured a breath of rain now leans against geological time.

The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.

In The Space Between, Pan allows interference to enter the image. She introduces what she calls “digital dust” which is the light noise written in code. She transforms the notion of emptiness into a form of material presence. While photographing the vast Arctic landscapes, she became aware of the invisible interval between herself and the world, a space seemingly void, yet filled with floating dust illuminated by light. She lets the image dissolve, leaving a thin shimmer of awareness behind.

The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.

The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.

Pan extends this question into the digital age. From film photography to digital coding, have we made the screens of our computers and phones the new containers for a nature that we increasingly encounter not in person but as data?

The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.

Ultimately, Yihan Pan’s work insists that the grand narratives of time, existence, and dissolution are to be found in the small fragments of the individual grain, showing us that in an age of infinite archives and readily accessible information, the most important connections we can make with the world around us come not only from what we can save, but also from what is always slipping away.

Calvino, I. (2016). Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. Penguin Classics, London.

Flusser, V. (2000). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books, London. (Original work published 1983).

Edited by Alicia Puig