“The Adventures of Pan and James” was a popular animal variety show featuring a chimpanzee named Pan (also affectionately known as Pankun)) and a bulldog named James, who tackled a range of challenges together. The program enjoyed enormous success, and Pan, in particular, became an iconic animal celebrity, celebrated for his remarkable intelligence and human-like behavior. But at the age of eleven, Pan was forced into retirement after attacking an intern during a performance. He was sent to a zoo, where—having been raised as a human—he struggled to adjust to life among his own kind, exhibiting intense signs of distress.
Pan had lived an extraordinary life, yet the moment he appeared to lose control, it was all stripped away. The show’s “narrative of happiness” may have been staged for the audience’s pleasure—but for Pan, it was reality.In this work, I designed a modular, transformable chimpanzee-inspired camera rig to simulate Pan’s point of view. I selected several “happy moments” from the original program and meticulously recreated the characters, costumes, and props. These scenes were re-shot from Pan’s subjective perspective and presented alongside footage from the original show, offering a mirrored encounter between fiction and experience.
We long to connect with animals through empathy, yet such empathy inevitably turns into control. From the perspective of a chimpanzee, actions we interpret as affectionate—stroking the head, shaking hands, giving hugs—may in fact feel like acts of dominance from a more powerful species: humans. The narrative of animal cuteness often conceals disciplinary violence, and the process of anthropomorphizing is frequently a form of control enacted in the name of “empathy.”
This human-centered upbringing inevitably leaves a profound psychological impact on Pan. We impose human emotional narratives onto animal behavior without ever truly listening to them—or accepting them as they are. These cherished interactions with others were perhaps nothing more than a dream, dreamt by a chimpanzee who was once made to live as a little human named Pan.
