Each year, the UK experiences an average of 156 days of rain. That’s almost every other day. It was during one of these downpours that artist Yihan Pan (b. 2002) found inspiration for her practice. She recalls: “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.” Pan was born in Beijing in 2002 and is now based in London, having studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts before completing an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. Throughout her studies, she developed a body of work that explores the tension between permanence and dissolution. At the heart of her practice is a careful study of rain, used as a metaphor for the ephemerality of life and the fleeting nature of human experience.
Ten Thousand Drops of Rain (2025) positions raindrops as a fragile unit of measurement. Pan used high-speed photography and microscopic lenses to isolate individual beads, each one only existing for a moment. She says: “They form a rhythm: one drop, two, eight, ten…until it rains, counting itself fails and dissolves into pure phenomenon. This sequence reflects ancient cosmology where one begets two, two begets three, and three begets all things. But where philosophy imagines expansion, I observe disappearance: the more we try to measure the world, the more it escapes our grasp.” One particularly poignant image, A Drop on a Swan (2025), captures the transient yet intricate interaction between a single droplet and a swan’s feather. The bead sits at its edge, perfectly spherical, appearing almost to defy gravity – a moment held still just long enough to be seen.
Elsewhere, Pan expands her investigation of scale in The Space Between, moving from the microscopic to the macro, juxtaposing sweeping Arctic vistas with minute dust particles. Here, she introduces digital methods. The images, captured on analogue film, are later infused with digital interference such as light fragments, noise patterns and flickers of “digital dust.” This reminds us that even in vast, seemingly empty spaces – like the Arctic air – there is more than meets the eye. Barren landscapes are transformed into living, dynamic scenes, imbued with renewed wonder.
Pan’s practice draws on writers who attend to the mundane with extraordinary care: Francis Ponge, devoted to the poetry of objects; Georges Perec, who catalogued the ‘infraordinary’; and Italo Calvino, who explored lightness as a form of ethical and imaginative clarity. She references Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in which he says: “the most fleeting things are often the most enduring in meaning.” Pan says: “Like them, I do not wish to conquer the world through measurement, but to accompany its fragility, to present the lightness that endures beneath the world’s surface weight.” In turning attention to the moments that often slip by unnoticed, Pan joins these thinkers in a quiet reverence for the everyday.
Through her lens, the ephemeral is made visible, and the overlooked is celebrated. Pan transforms a swan’s wing, a single droplet or the invisible dust in Arctic air into a mediation on life’s overlooked beauty. Viewers are invited to slow down and marvel at the delicate structures that quietly make up our world. Her work is a mediation on impermanence, a reminder that in noticing the smallest, most transient details, we can glimpse something profound.
Find Out More About the Artist: @pyhii
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.
2. A Drop on a Swan, Yihan Pan, 2025, analogue microscope photography, inkjet on Kozo paper
3. Ten Thousand Drops of Rain, Yihan Pan, 2025, digital print on Hahnemuâ êhle Rag Paper, 40 âà 100cm.
4. The Space Between, Yihan Pan, 2024, photo series, digital print on newspaper, variable dimensions.
5. Ten Thousand Drops of Rain, Yihan Pan, 2025, photo series
