QINGZHEN HAN

The exhibition A Beam of Light, A Cluster of Shade welcomes us to enter a vibrant natural landscape, with splashes of light, colour, and lines cascading down all around us, jingling and twinkling. Behind the dynamic and spontaneous images, Han Qingzhen interprets her practice of painting as a highly sophisticated system of self-development and automatism. The artist’s compositional touches indicate the abundant energy of mother nature, where the vibrant colours, dynamic lines, and complex textures jointly illustrate a magnificent and vigorous landscape through a unique perspective.

“Someone asked me why I paint abstracts. The world as the way I understand it can no longer be described in terms of abstraction and figuration, as Peter Doig said the creator must give colour to the void. Regardless of the form of the language, taking apart each stroke and looking at it carefully for me is somehow giving tangible visual support to the perceived situation. What enlightens people also grows out of this, but there are thousands of ways to interpret it. I learned to make copperplate prints in my undergraduate, and my familiarity with surfaces, processes, and marks subconsciously became a way of drawing. The produced strokes, the intuitive strokes, the descriptive strokes, the correct strokes, the wrong strokes, the modified strokes, themselves and the play of perception constitute the visual logic in my works, which present a context of unexplained references and layers of fractures.”

Although the works in this exhibition take abstraction as the form of expression, they explore the implications of the ontological language of abstraction rather than the mere visual presentation of the images. The naturally loose and fluent structure of the subjects in the images creates an inconsistent viewing perspective, inviting the viewer into a wandering world of spirituality. The complex motifs, shapes, and brushstrokes form a strong codependent relationship that derives from the methodology of the artistic practice. The study of printmaking back in college has shaped her conceptual interpretation of surfaces and traces. HAN does not attempt to envision the ultimate imagery, yet follows the graphic logic of her strokes, as the enlightenment of creative and artistic language. Viewers with knowledge and encounters in Eastern art aesthetics would often find a sense of resonance and connection in her works.