ABOUT THE DESIGNER
Weinan Pan — Designer, Maker and Founder of WEINAN PAN
Weinan Pan is a London-based jewellery designer and maker. She established her jewellery practice in London in 2014 and completed an MA Design (Jewellery) at Central Saint Martins with Distinction in 2019.
Her graduate collection, NOMAD, was shortlisted for the Tiffany & Co. × Outset Studiomakers Prize 2019.
She was named among UAL’s remarkable students, and her work was selected as one of 52 covers (No. 38 of 52) for the UAL Postgraduate Prospectus 2021/22, featuring students and recent graduates from across the University’s six colleges (Central Saint Martins, Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Arts, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion and Wimbledon College of Arts) and over 100 postgraduate courses.
In 2022, her graduate work was presented at the Tom Dixon Showroom in New York as part of NYCxDESIGN.
DESIGNING THROUGH MAKING
Weinan’s practice is rooted in a close relationship between designing and making. Rather than treating fabrication as the execution of a finished design, she allows creative decision-making to remain active throughout the making process.
As a piece develops, elements may be added, removed or refined in direct response to the material, the emerging form and the designer’s intuition. Keeping the making process largely in her own hands allows this creative freedom to continue throughout the development of each piece.
Years of hands-on making allow technical understanding, material experience and visual judgement to become increasingly immediate. Decisions that may appear spontaneous are grounded in accumulated experience: an understanding of how a metal will move, how a surface may respond, or when a form has reached the point at which it should be left alone.
Therefore, rather than reproducing a design through a rigid sequence of predetermined instructions, each piece of WEINAN PAN jewellery is allowed to develop a subtle character of its own.
AUTHORSHIP, SCALE & SELECTIVE STOCKISTS
This direct physical involvement is an important part of authorship within WEINAN PAN. The intimacy of the process naturally places a limit on scale, while allowing every piece to retain a direct physical connection to the designer-maker.
As an independent designer-led studio with a deliberately small-scale, predominantly handmade practice, WEINAN PAN has taken a measured and selective approach to growth.
WEINAN PAN jewellery was first invited to join Dover Street Market International in 2019. The collaboration was delayed by the pandemic, and finally launched in May 2024.
Today, Dover Street Market is one of WEINAN PAN’s international stockists, with the jewellery available at Dover Street Market London (DSML), New York (DSMNY), Los Angeles (DSMLA) and Singapore (DSMS), while the studio continues to undertake bespoke projects and made-to-order pieces.
OUTSIDE WORK
Outside her jewellery practice, Weinan is a mother and an avid lover of nature, houseplants and animals. She enjoys piano, dancing and spending time outdoors whenever she can.