HAN JINPENG

On Han Jinpeng’s gold-framed video screens, Western art’s best known paintings collide with nature’s most intractable features: rain and wind. Costumed as the Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Milkmaid, the artist - with the aid of a friend off-camera - subjects himself to a steadily intensifying series of climatic assaults. A few drops of rain become a deluge; a light breeze blows into a hurricane. Finally, wigless, skirtless, blinking and gasping, Han Jinpeng is forced to abandon his act and revert to his everyday, if visibly uncomfortable, self. None of the filmed weather is real: it was created with lamps and a dimmer switch, tap water and a large electric fan. Yet it does reveal true nature - that of the protagonist: “As the fake Mona Lisa is washed away,” Han Jinpeng says, “you can see the real person.” His take on the intersections between nature and human creations may make viewers laugh, but it is “a serious social issue”, he says. “Civilisation is artificial. We should never assume that we can push nature around.”