Ren Light Pan: Nude and Number / Lyles & King, New York. Opening reception, September 3, 2025. Press text:
As long as I've known her, Ren's whole apartment has been centered around a big full-length mirror. There is a way something given pride of place in your home could be uniquely meaningful, like an altar. But that place can also be occupied by something utterly banal, like a coffeemaker or the screen of your work computer.
It gets easier and easier to expose yourself to new people if you make it a habit. Even if it's unpleasant initially, over time your tolerance will improve. And it's far easier to endure social scenarios if you feel like part of a group.
"Exposure" is a funny word with this work, because the same process that makes the pictures also fuzzes them out with light and heat. The images accumulate on the surface like coffee rings, but the exposure's selective. The repeated figure’s naked, but a less than high-fidelity process withholds just enough information to ironize the “reveal.”
As a child, my mother accounted for my shyness by explaining I was "sensitive," which was embarrassing, but also lent me a sort of princess-and-the-pea style air of discernment, which I prided myself on, even then.
If being exposed makes you uncomfortable, one possibility is withdrawal. The other reaction is deadpan: to deliberately display yourself the way you'd like to be observed.
POLONIUS I will take my leave of you.
HAMLET You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—
—Poy Born, 2025
Ren Light Pan (b. 1990, Irvine, CA) has had solo exhibitions at Queer Thoughts, New York, NY and Jassamine, Dallas, TX. She has been included in group exhibitions at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Asia Society Texas, Houston, TX; Martos Gallery, New York, NY; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Eli Klein Gallery, New York, NY; and Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris, FR; among others. Pan has work in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, and the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Pan lives and works in New York.
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