artist stainless steel book stand, Indian Khadi Paper

The video installation Panchatantra is named after the eponymous ancient Indian collection of animal fables that has spread globally from India since 200 BCE and retold numerous times in more than 50 non-Indian languages. Inspired by the cross-cultural literary migration embodied by the Indian fables, Han Mengyun narrates disparate conceptions and representations of mirror and varied ideas of the mirror image through 5 videos, which are titled respectively The Origin, Dream, Book, In Praise of the Moon, and Le Désir.

Han Mengyun's research on the inner visual logic of ancient manuscripts has taken her beyond traditional media such as painting and drawing. The video installation Panchatantra is her attempt to extend the word-image interplay peculiar to the book to contemporary media which disrupts conventional ways of viewing moving-image. In the installation, 5 book- stands designed by the artist are scattered in the space. The videos are projected downwards from the ceiling onto the two pieces of Indian Khadi handmade paper placed on the bookstand. The change in the viewing posture aims to evoke the forgotten/or erased cultural and spiritual memory that gave birth to the image. The pixels of the video also become the grain of fiber because of the paper receiving the projection, blurring the medial boundary between video and book, thereby creating a synaesthetic experience. 

Le Désir reveals mirror's complicity in power. The artist visited the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. When looking at the mirror, she saw the outer world through the windows behind her. The mirror is instrumental in capturing and confining the world inside the palace, doomed to endless duplication. Just as Jorge Luis Borge says:“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.....Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe." (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1940) 

The artist explores her surrounding world as she takes the mirror that acts as a voyeuristic device. In the mirror, we see the world as a dream, lucid and surreal yet forever unattainable. The mirror placed inside the picture frame generates endless new images while being watched.