Painted after Pan's return to Paris and at the outbreak of the Second World War, the self-portrait places her in Chinese dress with a fan. The setting does not simply advertise identity to a European audience. It is a constructed studio space in which the artist controls clothing, props, pose, and the terms of looking.
Pan's gaze is direct without being theatrical. Oil modelling and a darkened palette give the figure weight, while the fan and dress introduce linear and patterned counterpoints. The portrait insists that cosmopolitan training did not require the erasure of self-fashioned cultural specificity.
