Ren Light Pan is a Chinese-American transgender artist living and working in New York, NY. Her work engages with biographical issues dealing with hybridized and transgressive cultural and gender identities. Working between Eastern and Western art history, her strategic use of traditional Chinese ink against modes of contemporary painting—namely readymade or anti-gestures, deconstruction as well as techniques influenced by photographic, filmic and printmaking processes—opened a space for contentious harmony.

Born in an immigrant family, she grew up speaking Mandarin with a strong Chinese identity. Her early interests included oil painting, photography and filmmaking. After receiving her B.A. in New Media – Film/Video at the University of California San Diego in 2012, the artist fell into a multi-year depression where she turned to ink painting for solace. The work came from a deep desire for divorce: from the hand, the body, the self. To the artist, her repositioning of artistic agency and authorship was the first step of many toward her eventual reconciliation with her gender identity.

In 2016, Ren Light Pan underwent a transition, relocating to Los Angeles and ceasing her painting practice for a period of 7 years. However, in 2022, the artist rediscovered her past works and reengaged with them, embarking on a journey to explore the potential of ink as a process-oriented dialogue within her posthumous practice.