Commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, for the inaugural Diriyah Biennale in 2021, Han Mengyun’s The Pavilion of Three Mirrors emerges from her sustained investigation into transcultural exchange and the circulation of aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual ideas across time and geography. The work draws inspiration from the allegorical tale of the “Competition Between Two Painters,” recounted in the Khamsa of the twelfth-century Persian poet Niẓāmī Ganjavi—a story that has long traveled across cultures and literary traditions.

In the tale, Alexander the Great summons a Roman and a Chinese painter to determine who possesses greater mastery. Each is assigned a wall, separated by a curtain. When the veil is lifted, the Roman painter reveals a meticulously rendered image, while the Chinese painter—having painted nothing—has polished his wall into a mirror capable of reflecting all things, including the opposing painting itself. Rather than declaring a victor, the story stages a meditation on different modes of seeing, knowing, and representing the world.

Han approaches this narrative not as a fixed allegory but as a structure for thinking through transcultural perception. In Persian and Islamic literary traditions, “China” often appears as an imagined site of visual refinement—an idea shaped as much by circulation and translation as by direct encounter. The Pavilion of Three Mirrors is a contemporary reenactment of historical encounter: not a synthesis of cultures, but a space where different visual systems coexist, refract one another, and generate new relations through renewed encounters.