The first thing I see upon entering Ren Light Pan’s tiny New York studio is a large canvas with a monochrome image of Sleeping Hermaphroditus. It’s the one that’s in the Louvre: a life-size marble Roman copy of an ancient Greek bronze from the 2nd century C.E. Pan shows me a series of smaller images on canvas, variations on this classical figure by other artists. But Pan’s big one is most arresting, in part because it’s from a photograph in which we see the legs of spectators behind the reclining marble figure.
It’s not surprising that a transgender artist would choose this subject, or that a transgender writer would immediately recognize it. Hermaphroditus is a supposedly mythical figure. He was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, so hot he turned the head of Salmacis. She was a rather wayward naiad who tried to force herself on the boy. The gods granted her prayer to unite them forever—and they became Hermaphroditus.
In Western visual culture, Hermaphroditus is an ancestor of transgender porn. Seen from behind, the reclining figure is all graceful shoulder and delicious ass; seen from the other side—dick and a hint of breast. Pan’s versions dramatize the dilemma of the trans artist (and the trans writer, too): that we’re never not seen through the cis gaze, through which we’re some mythical thing. We’re the anomaly that gives the cis the comfortable feeling of being normal. To misquote Dorothy Parker: Being cis is not normal, it’s just common. Or, as Pan says: “We’ve been around forever, but we’re always a spectacle.”
Pan’s images are made with a kind of duotone method of her own invention. She mixes ink and water on a flat surface—usually the floor of the studio. Over that is suspended a primed canvas. On top of that, she lays a transparent film bearing the image ordered up from the copy shop across the street. Overhead are the kind of heat lamps you can get from a hardware store. With all the parts in place, the image forms over an hour or two as the heat evaporates the mix of ink and water.
Pan came up with this method—a way of “creating a situation where I’m not entirely in control”—to circumvent her perfectionist tendencies. What she surrenders in terms of control, she gains in autonomy. The materials are easily sourced, low-tech, and don’t require collaborators. “The ink is so cheap,” she says. (“But let’s not tell the collectors that,” I say.)
There’s a lot of accumulated knowledge about the process that goes into making Pan’s striking images. The image transfer is sensitive to temperature and humidity, but she has learned from experience how long the exposure is likely to take. The results are beautiful, in part because, in a world where we see endless images, Pan’s homebrew method gives them a unique appearance.
Pan shows me some works in other series, based on other images, including one of her own body. Making these involved lying in the pose for over an hour while the image formed. That was before she transitioned. Since then she has abandoned the masochistic durational performance side of the image-making process. Which is a good thing, I tell her. Both of us are done with the pain our bodies used to cause us. Now we’re making beautiful things with our beautiful flesh. Even if, like Hermaphroditus, we have to put up with being a spectacle, it’s a living.
