Pan Jian: Optical Haze

ART LABOR Gallery is delighted to present Optical Haze, the third solo exhibition by artist Pan Jian at the gallery. The exhibition features a new series of paintings that extend his long-standing inquiry into the nature of light while deepening his visual language and conceptual reflection on perception and the natural world.

“Optical haze” is both a photographic language and a natural phenomenon. With acute sensitivity, Pan translates the layers of light and mist in nature into painterly form, creating a space that hovers between reality and illusion. Through overlapping, blending, and veiling of color, his paintings evoke the diffusion of light as it refracts and reflects through varying densities of air, producing a subtle, immersive visual field. Viewers are drawn into a soft yet profound tension between clarity and obscurity, material and immaterial.

For Pan, the essence of “Optical Haze” lies in the transformation of light itself—an omnipresent yet elusive force of nature. As light penetrates and scatters through mist, it generates a world that appears both blurred and dimensional. Drawing inspiration from photography, Pan incorporates its sense of light and spatial layering while infusing the tactile sensitivity of painting. Using a combination of acrylic and sand, he achieves a delicate atmospheric texture where light and mist coalesce across the canvas, forming a poetic equilibrium between the physical and the perceptual.

From Those Which Illuminate (2020) to All the Way Back to the End of the Light (2024), and now Optical Haze (2025), Pan Jian’s practice has consistently centered on the essence of light. Through ongoing material experimentation and perceptual exploration, he transforms light from a physical condition into an emotional and spiritual symbol, constructing a painterly philosophy that radiates both clarity and depth.