Panpan Yang’s creative work extends across a variety of disciplines and media, including poetry, installation, artists’ books, and the moving image. She is particularly intrigued by the interactions between art and space, through which contingency emerges. Along this line of inquiry, she is one of the selected artists for the ongoing “Xu Bing Space Art Residency Program,” exploring the intersection of experimental art and satellite technology.

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Her most ambitious “space” project so far is Small Gallery (2023–present), an experimental art space that was transformed from a 1920s semi-detached house in North London. There, she led “London is Calling: Emerging Artists Initiative,” creating solo and double-solo exhibitions for female and LGBTQIA+ artists. Viewed at a different scale and as a whole, Small Gallery can also be understood as a conceptual art project that explores the complex relationship between art and life. Put differently, it is a literally “contemporary” art experiment in which everyday life is used as artistic material.

In collaboration with Diyou Yu, Panpan created Handscroll, a poetry-based installation currently on display in Small Gallery’s inclusive toilet. Handscroll was exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary, and one of its editions is held in SOAS Library’s Special Collections. Another related art project—only partially realized—involves using a traditional Chinese calligraphy brush and a new superhydrophobic nanomaterial (as “ink”) to inscribe a poem on the bathtub in Small Gallery’s toilet. Written from the perspective of a bathtub, the poem is completely invisible when the bathtub is dry and gradually becomes visible during the everyday routine of filling it with hot water.

 

Another motif in Panpan’s work is how contemporary art practices put art history into play. In 2025, she trained generative AI to “restore” the three missing scenes of The Admonitions Scroll (a.k.a., Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies), held in the British Museum’s collection. The result was the first edition of The Admonitions Scroll Restoration Project (5 + 1 AP).

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Panpan is a recipient of China’s National Young Screenwriter Award, the Domitor Essay Award, an honorable mention from the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, and multiple Sino-British Fellowship Trust grants, among other awards and grants. Her work has also been supported by the Getty Foundation and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. She has delivered invited talks at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Peking University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, among others.

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Panpan received her BA from the School of Arts at Peking University, her MA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is currently an assistant professor in arts and visual culture at SOAS University of London. 

 

https://www.yangpanpan.com/