27 March — 7 June 2026
Opening Event: Friday 27 March • 5:30 - 7:30PM
Angela Pan:
LITA
LITA is an ongoing project that maps and renegotiates notions of femininity and emptiness drawn from popular culture, religious frameworks, cultural mythologies, consumer imaginaries, and virtual reality. Her name operates as a pun derived from the Chinese term 利他 (altruism), where emptiness is historically framed as virtue, sacrifice, and transcendence.
Mothlight, 2026. Single-channel video animation, 2560 X 2560 px, sound, 20’00”
This exhibition examines the thresholds between the feminine body, emptiness, transcendence, and capitalism through the virtual avatar LITA.
LITA is an ongoing project that maps and renegotiates notions of femininity and emptiness drawn from popular culture, religious frameworks, cultural mythologies, consumer imaginaries, and virtual reality. Her name operates as a pun derived from the Chinese term 利他 (altruism), where emptiness is historically framed as virtue, sacrifice, and transcendence.
Situated within a space formerly used as a domestic room, the exhibition collapses distinctions between private and symbolic space, body and architecture. An altar-like arrangement guides audiences through a contemplative environment that echoes both religious devotion and contemporary image economies, in which bodies are endlessly reproduced, optimised, and consumed, even in presumed absence.
Within dominant discourses of femininity, emptiness has functioned as a condition of marginalisation, enacted through renunciation, self-optimisation, and selflessness, while simultaneously being celebrated and fetishised as power, beauty, and virtue. LITA embodies the paradox of constructing and gendering a body under these conditions. In a capitalist system that promises individuality and autonomy through consumption, desire drives affect into labour, sustaining and mystifying ideological structures. LITA’s body remains persistently fantasised within this economy of visibility.
Across sculptural forms, moving image, and digital prints, LITA appears as relic, surface, and landscape. Through layering, fragmentation, and repetition, the exhibition stages LITA as a figure of belief whose body shifts between object of desire, apparition, and glitch. Rather than narrating transformation as progress, the exhibition foregrounds states of absence and becoming. Drawing from Buddhist understandings of emptiness as flux and impermanence, emptiness is conceived not as lack but as generative potential.
About the Artist
Angela Pan is a Chinese-New Zealand artist born and living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Pan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at the Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts and Design in 2021 and 2023. Her interdisciplinary practice includes 3D-animation, moving-image, film, printmaking, sculpture, game art, painting, and installation, where she explores how the body, desire, and personal mythologies are shaped by systems of meaning and power. Pan’s works often move between
form and ambiguity through fragmentating and layering existing representations to incite opportunities for epistemological slippages and transcendence.
A long-term project of Pan’s practice is the virtual avatar LITA, which explores different ways of understanding the relationship between form, femininity, and emptiness in search for further possibilities of the body and the self. The project networks the body across tensions of cross-cultural conditioning, technology, gender, hypervisibility, commodification, religion, and fantasies.
Recent exhibitions include Dialogues in Video Art: Works from the Chartwell Collection and Elam Artists at George Fraser Gallery (2025), Spoilt Objects (2025) at Grace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau, HORIZONS (2025) at Aotearoa Art Fair, Tāmaki Makaurau, Sunlighting (2023) at Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau.