The Unending Rose
ShanghART Shanghai
2023
Borrowing its title from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ eponymous poem, the exhibition The Unending Rose brings together the artist’s most recent paintings, works on paper, as well as architectural and video installations.
In the poem, through the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur who gazes at the rose, a symbol trapped in the finitude of human language, Borges discovers the literary infinity of the rose, which perennially accrues meaning via the course of migration and the collective act of retelling. Inspired by transcultural literary traditions and the subsequent semantic transformation, Han Mengyun shares with Borges such belief in the potential of infinity represented by the rose.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the Mirror Pavilion, an architectural installation inspired by an ancient tale of “The competition between Chinese and Rum artists” retold by poets such as Nizami Ganjavi in his Khamsa and Jalal al-Din Rumi in his Masnavi. The story goes that Alexander the Great, hearing that both the Romans and the Chinese were famous for their painting, wanted to see who in the world was the best. He then summoned a Roman and a Chinese painter to compete in the royal hall on two opposing walls. By the end of the competition, two identical paintings emerged. The Roman painting was splendid in its incredible realism and vividness while the Chinese painter did not paint but simply polished the wall into a mirror, through which the Roman’s painting across the room and the world were reflected.
First shown in the inaugural Diriyah Biennale (2021), The Pavilion of Three Mirrors aims to render an abstract and poetic representation of this ancient story, which provides many insights into the different conceptions of visual representations between cultures. The work also sheds light on the premodern history of cultural exchange that goes unnoticed in our present time, while offering an alternative paradigm of image-making through the rediscovery of a shared legacy across cultures. In the second iteration The Unending Rose, the vaulted mirror installation not only represents the Chinese painter that polishes a mirror in the story but also a Borgesian mirror labyrinth, in which the path forks at every possibility of interpretation of the viewer.
Inspired by the visual configuration of book art – an early form of global media that forged trans-regional connections and shaped cross-cultural contacts – Han Mengyun’s paintings merge the formal characteristics of Buddhist and Islamicate manuscripts with elements drawn from Chinese and Japanese woodblock-printed books. This amalgamation of diverse influences is set against the backdrop of the material basis of the Western painting tradition, resulting in a rich transcultural visual hybridity. The eponymous painting series embodies such hybridity and the woodblock-printed ornamental borders suggest that the paintings are at the same time books. On the page that is the canvas, the rose is conceived as a signifier that forges a semantic connection between symbolic construction and the signified. As a product of language, the rose is bound to be reconfigured, the objectifying gaze displaced.
Beyond traditional media such as painting and drawing, Han attempts to extend the word-image interplay peculiar to the book to contemporary media that provides a synesthetic experience. Her video installation, Panchatantra, explores disparate definitions of the mirror through five captivating videos, including The Origin, Dream, Book), In Praise of the Moon and Le Désir, which are projected onto a book stand designed by the artist, blurring the boundary between seeing and reading, language and (moving) image.
In the poet’s endless incantation, the rose becomes infinite, like the repetition of prayer beads that render the shape of eternity. Following the footsteps of ancient poets, Han Mengyun returns to pre-modern pictorial, literary, philosophical and material manifestations of multicultural cross-pollinations, and by doing so, establishes the basis of a new paradigm of aesthetic pluralism that is necessary for imagining the coexistence of differences.
Ancient Persian poets compare poetry to a pearl necklace. Each couplet in the poem is like a pearl. Once strung by meter and grammar, they form a perfect verse. Deeply influenced by Indian and Persian art and literature, Han Mengyun recreated the poetic imagery in the mind of Persian poets in works such as “A Broken Verse I”(2021), a manuscript-like painting depicting a severed string of pearls. “Scattered Pearls” (ongoing since 2021), on the other hand, is a series of works on paper inspired by another form of Persian literature—prose, which evokes the image of loosely scattered pearls that engage in an open and spatial dialogue with one another.
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.
The Origin, as the opening chapter of the sequence, presents the universal motif for the creation of the world--clay. The artist documents the process of herself and her daughter playing with clay, juxtaposing artistic creation and the creatiton of the world. To the artist, mother and daughter are mirrors to each other, reflecting the karmic interconnections between generations of women.
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.
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 ceaselessly flipping Book without words is the artist's tribute to Jorge Luis Borges and world literature that deeply inspired and enriched her. How a book is configured reflects how a culture perceives and conceives the world. The Book is a mirror of civilization.