Pan Jian Feng (b. 1973) is a Shanghai-based artist with a background as one of China’s foremost typeface creators and design strategists. Having worked for big multinational agencies and having later founded his own company, Alt-Design, Pan recently changed the corporate world to a life of an artist. Exploring Chinese daily life, his projects range from photography and video installations to ink painting and porcelain.
Written people in the life of Pan Jian Feng.
“It’s all about life,” Pan Jian Feng tells me about taking up art. “Art is more like a continuation of my life while in an agency you always had to work according to a brief.” However, in China, moving from the corporate world to the artistic one is rare. “It made my mom very angry,” he says.
One of Jian Feng’s projects is to paint all the interesting people that he meets. “It’s my daily practice – like a visual diary,” he explains. “I document at least 20 people each day. Some are my friends, some are neighbours, some I’ve never met before.” His paintings have a close connection to Chinese calligraphy. Instead of “painting” people, he actually describes his activity as “writing” people. And just as in Chinese calligraphy, he respects the process: “It’s not about writing correctly, it’s about meditating.” Like this project, many of Pan Jian Feng’s works seem to reflect the contemporary meaning of Chinese skills – or Chinese life in general.
“When I was travelling in southern France, I was very impressed by the blue colour of the sea,” Pan Jian Feng explains another project on Chinese identity. “I wanted to share this blueness with my Chinese friends, but didn’t know how to bring the blue back to China.” In China, the concept of blue is linked to the Western world and during the past century, China has been trying to learn from the West and find its own way at the same time. “The question that emerges is, what is the true blue that China should study and how,” he continues. As a reaction to the fast pace of change, Jian Feng has used traditional Chinese objects like enamel cups as media for his work in a country, where people tend to be in constant search of something new, forgetting the old.
In the blue in southern France.
Like the Western blue or the enamel cup, Pan Jian Feng’s work involves a lot of symbols that require some knowledge of Chinese culture and aesthetics to understand. For instance, while studying Visual Communication at the University of Central England, he made a design with red images representing longevity and happiness, which his tutor interpreted as bloody and violent. Moreover, his typography often involves hidden messages playing with the Chinese writing system.
Currently Pan Jian Feng is focusing his skills on experimental typography with the aim of developing a forum for international dialogue in the field. His latest works include a game which applies Chinese calligraphy styles and techniques to Western typography and contemporary communication. In the meanwhile, he keeps on reading and writing people.
