Chinese artist Stephen Pan was born in Shanghai in 1963. Pan was five, when his grandfather, famous for calligraphy and poetry, Bo Yin Pan, gave him the first lessons in drawing and painting. Ironically, in spite of his close relationship with formal Chinese traditions in art, Pan fell deeply in love with the paintings of the Renaissance and French Impressionist periods. By age 13 Stephen won the first of a series of National Art Excellence awards in China for his beautifully rendered oil paintings. He began his teaching career in Shanghai at age 20 and found his young students were eager to study art from him.

Pan left China for the United States and devoted his life to drawing and painting. His uncle sponsored his immigration to the United states to continue his artistic career. In 1997, Pan was offered a position at the academy of Art College in San Francisco. Pan is an extremely versatile artist in the classic European oil painting tradition. His singular artistic expression is easily recognized in his sublimely elegant and serene paintings. Since 1987 he has focused primarily on original figurative oil paintings on canvas. In order to make his work available to the greater audience, Pan has begun to explore publishing and documenting his masterpieces.