Group Exhibition SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul Korea
Dr. Sigg followed the Chinese art scene from its beginnings in the late 70s continuing throughout the 1990s while serving as Switzerland’s ambassador to China, Mongolia, and North Korea. Over the years, he has built the world’s leading collection of Chinese contemporary art with an encyclopedic approach. In 2012, Sigg donated 1,463 Chinese contemporary artworks to M+ in Hong Kong, under The M+ Sigg Collection. Today, this new landmark museum presents exhibitions showcasing the artistic developments in China over the past four decades at its Sigg Galleries.
Han Mengyun, "The Pavilion of Three Mirrors"
The Pavilion of Three Mirrors is the result of such endeavor. It takes the Persian story Iskandar-nama of Khamsa (Book of Alexander), written by the twelfth-century poet Nizami Ganjavi, as its point of departure. One episode in the book describes a competition between Alexander the Great and the emperor of China over Greek and Chinese artistic traditions. Each invites an artist to create a work that exemplifies their culture's aesthetic mastery. While the Greek work was exquisitely painted, the Chinese artist then revealed their work to be a polished mirror, reflecting the painting of the Greek perfectly.
The installation is an abstract and poetic representation of this narrative. The polished-metal structure alludes to the Chinese artwork in the story, yet it is also a translation of Islamic architectural vaults. The pavilion serves as a site of cultural memory: as the audience traverses the room, the installation unfolds like a manuscript, chapter by chapter, painting by painting. Each work contains references to fables or mythical poems from a range of regions and cultures. The artist adopts a speculative and universalist approach, blending motifs, imagery, techniques and languages from different traditions in an attempt to envision a shared symbology of love and passion, loss and longing across cultures. The spatial experience of the architectural installation surrounded by the paintings renders a rove between history and mythology, reality and its reflection, the mind and painting.
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