In her first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, the Chinese-born, Paris-based artist Han Bing presents a group of new, large-scale paintings alongside more intimate and instinctive works on paper.
I like very minimal and straightforward language that can bear a tremendous amount of weight and history. It might no longer mean what it meant, but it still carries that load of information with it so that something that seems quiet and innocent is actually a wave of energy that can be quite sublime and can contain so much, like a cloud. — Han Bing
Watch a video of the artist discussing her new works.
Han Bing describes walking around the city and experiencing visual ‘clashes’, where a serendipitous combination of colours and textures will solidify into a painting in her mind’s eye. She is particularly drawn to the torn posters she sees in the Paris métro. Halfway to being taken down or simply abandoned, the accidental compositions resonate with the artist, who explains: ‘It’s like running into a poem someone wrote on the corner of a wall. The person who wrote it might not have intended to pass on the information the way I perceived it, but somehow I saw it and it made an impact on me.’
Han BingBetween Her and Her God, 2023
Oil on linen
143 x 177.8 cm (56.3 x 70 in)
Han Bing
Over the ground, Han then sketches out the outlines of the composition, or what she terms ‘the skeleton’, before adding colour – ‘the tissue’. As she works, the paintings take on a shape and mind of their own: she thinks of them as ‘creatures’, allowing herself to be guided by them to their final form.
Han BingNot Hostile Not Reluctant Not Deaf, 2023
Oil and acrylic on linen
172.7 x 263.2 cm (67.99 x 103.62 in)
The immediacy of Han’s approach is perhaps most evident in the small works on paper on view in the exhibition. They are spontaneous creations in which she allows paint to coagulate into abstract patterns over pages cut out of newspapers. ‘All of the framed journalistic images function as a window that I pick through, connecting my own world, which happens in the studio, and the outside world’, says the artist.
Han Bing
Sutra I, 2023
Acrylic and oil on paper
30.2 x 55.5 cm (11.89 x 21.85 in)
Sutra X, 2023
Acrylic on paper
30.5 x 25 cm (12.01 x 9.84 in)
In a way, it's kind of an extension of the paintings. Something seems like it’s out of control, but then it's also freezing that specific time. And it's also freezing a very specific moment in another painting. — Han Bing
Han prefers the term ‘organic’ to the traditional dialectic of abstraction and figuration. Paintings such as 3:33 (2023) in particular elude such binary categorisations. The tile-like patterns in the composition have a familiar urban quality and yet might also function as colour fields or grids along Modernist tropes.
Han Bing3:33, 2023
Oil on linen
143 x 177.8 cm (56.3 x 70 in)
