潘无依Wuyi Pan

Wuyi Pan was born in 1980 in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. A novelist, poet, and painter, she is widely regarded as a pioneering voice of China's post-80s avant-garde literary generation — and among its most celebrated female writers.

She pioneered the literary form she calls poetic fiction — prose imbued with the cadence, imagery, and emotional density of poetry. Her landmark novel Gregarious Beetles, published in China's prestigious Harvest literary journal in 2001, made her one of the youngest writers ever featured there.

In 2008 she led the celebrated "Eight Golden Flowers" collective of female Chinese writers. In 2011 she studied in Madrid; in 2015 she relocated to New York. In 2018, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Dewey International United University.

As a painter, she works with oil pastels — a medium she chose for its immediacy and portability during years of living out of a suitcase. Her canvases are defined by radiant light and the deliberate absence of shadow: "I look for shadows and cannot find them. I only see light."