BIO

Han Mengyun (b.1989, Wuhan China) is a multimedia artist and bilingual writer currently based in London.

Initially trained in the tradition of Western oil painting, she sought alterity in the histories of Chinese, Indian and Islamic art, via a long-term dedicated study of their respective yet interconnected religious, cultural and linguistic discourses. Her work manifests a high degree of transculturalism, the process of becoming which led to her critical reflection on the conflicts and possible communication between differing cultural and aesthetic perceptions in an ever more globalized world. In her wishful thinking, an aesthetic conflict demands an aesthetic resolution. And in finding that resolution through her art practice, she seeks to establish a wholeness of the self that has been fragmented by modernity, globalization, postcoloniality and diaspora. The diverse materiality and media employed in her work, such as craft and architectural structures, embodies a wide range of her interests in global art history and visual cultures, as well as their inseparable and inter-contextual relationship. In trying to achieve an organic hybridization of disparities, or to offer coexistence through spatial constellation as shelter, Han Mengyun mediates the fissure between the self and the other, tradition and innovation, the hegemon and the subaltern, the spiritual and the mundane, universal suffering and contingent emancipation.

Han Mengyun received her B. A in Studio Art from Bard College in the US in 2012 and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories in 2018. The focus of her research is on the art of the book across cultures, i.e. Indian and Persian manuscripts and woodblock printed books in China and Japan etc.

Recent exhibitions include: Night (IS A Gallery, Shanghai, 2022); The Glass Bead Game (ShanghArt Gallery, Art Basel, Basel, 2022); The Pavilion of Three Mirrors (Ad-Diriyah Biennale: Feeling the Stones, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2021); A Place for Concealment (Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing, 2022); The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2021); Splinters of Jade (A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu (2019); In Between Islands (Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2013) etc.

Profile on Ocula  here

contact: mengyun.han@gmail.com