HAN MENGYUN

Han’s images stage an encounter between Dutch vanitas paintings and Buddhist depictions of skeletons and skulls. Whereas vanitas and memento mori traditions expose worldly vanity, Buddhist ‘meditations on repulsiveness’ confront impermanence as a precondition of enlightenment. Interweaving iconographies through a repertoire of skulls, hourglasses, and other emblems of transience, Han constructs mandala‑like configurations, printed with woodblocks she has collected across Asia. The mandala serves as a phenomenological prism—an architectonic map through which both the macrocosm and the psyche can be apprehended. Such material and visual hybridity stages a tension between sensuous surface and metaphysical aspiration. Works such as Spaß und Tod, with its skeletal hands poised in play, recall the late‑medieval Danse macabre and Tibetan thangka of the citipati, acknowledging death as a kinetic partner in the continuum of life and the catalyst of existential transformation.

The series marks the artist’s return to oil painting which she rejected for almost a decade in search of an alternative to ‘the Western’. ‘In the prospect of grim uncertainty,’ The artist said: ‘I felt an urgent craving for the corporeal lusciousness of oil, the exhilarating violence of the brush, the humble endurance of canvas—capacities ink and rice paper cannot sustain. In this existential aporia, I understood for the first time the Heideggerean Sein-zum-Tode, being-toward-death—the unflinching awareness of finitude makes life infinitely possible.’