Mirror Pavilion is an ongoing series of site-specific multimedia installations by Han Mengyun. Its first iteration, The Pavilion of Three Mirrors, was presented at the inaugural Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in late 2021. The work foregrounded one of the exhibition’s distinctive lines of inquiry: the historical and aesthetic encounters between China and West Asia. Such transcultural exchanges remain central to Han’s wider practice, through which she examines how artistic forms, materials and systems of thought migrate across geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries. The series takes as its point of departure the celebrated tale of the “Competition Between the Chinese and Roman Painters,” recounted in the Khamsa by the twelfth-century Persian poet Niẓāmī Ganjavi.

In the story, Alexander the Great, having heard of the exceptional reputations of both Roman and Chinese painters, summons representatives of each tradition to determine which is superior. The two painters are instructed to work on opposing walls of the royal hall, separated by a curtain that prevents either from seeing the other’s progress. When the curtain is finally removed, Alexander is astonished to encounter what appear to be two identical images. The Roman painter has produced a work of extraordinary realism and lifelike illusion. The Chinese painter, however, has applied no pigment at all, instead polishing the wall until it becomes a mirror capable of reflecting everything before it—including the Roman painting on the opposite wall.

Mirror Pavilion as a multimedia installation offers an abstract and poetic reimagining of this parable, transforming it into a spatial meditation on cultural memory, perception and artistic translation. As visitors move through its mirrored vaults, they pass between reality and illusion, history and mythology, image and reflection. The paintings unfold with the sequential rhythm of an illuminated manuscript—chapter by chapter, page by page—interweaving motifs, iconographies and literary references drawn from multiple ancient traditions.

Rather than presenting cultures as discrete or self-contained, The Pavilion of Three Mirrors proposes hybridity as their underlying condition. The work creates a space in which seemingly divergent modes of seeing, thinking and making are not reconciled into sameness, but allowed to coexist, reflect and transform one another.