Nobody in the history of fashion photography has ever used a fan as a fan. The moment one enters a frame, it stops being an object and becomes a punctuation mark, and your job is to know which one. Held flat at the chest, it is a full stop: composed, concluded, nothing further. Half-open at an angle, a comma, the picture visibly mid-thought. And the slow reveal from behind pleats, which clients request without knowing its name, is a question mark aimed directly at the viewer.
I learned this vocabulary in the vermilion room, on the hanfu sitting with the lanterns and the kumquat branches. The prop table held eleven fans, and the stylist, a quiet genius from Xi'an, would not let me touch one until I could say what it was for. Not 'it's pretty'. For. She held up the round silk fan painted with mountains and waited. Eventually I said: it's for standing between me and the camera without leaving. She gave it to me the way you hand someone their diploma.
The technical part is wrists. A fan amplifies the wrist the way a microphone amplifies a whisper, which means every small dishonesty in the hand gets published. Grip it and the frame reads as fear. Let it float too loosely and it reads as theatre. The correct hold is the one you'd use for a bird you trust: present, warm, prepared at any moment to mean something.
There is also the matter of the face. A fan near the face does not hide it; it nominates it. Whatever remains visible above the pleats, usually the eyes, is suddenly the entire text of the picture. I have done frames where my whole performance was the two centimetres between eyebrow and fan edge. They are, my agent tells me, among my most licensed images. Two centimetres. My grandmother's shoulder lines took her forty years. The economy of this business is not always dignified.
At home I keep the mountain fan from Xi'an on the wall above the inkstone, retired with honours. On difficult days I take it down and open it slowly, once, listening to the pleats. It still sounds like the start of a sentence. I still haven't decided which kind.