Solo Exhibition ZHI Art Museum, Chengdu
Exhibition Opening: 2024.12.15 (Invited only)
Public Exhibition: 2024.12.16-2025.06.08
Organizer: ZHI ART MUSEUM
Co-Organizer: BAO FOUNDATION (Forthcoming)
Exhibition Support: ShanghART
Guidance Unit: Culture, Broadcast-TV, Sports and Tourism Bureau of Xinjin District, Chengdu, Sichuan; Lihuaxi Cultural Tourism Zone Administrative Committee of Xinjin District, Chengdu, Sichuan
Address: ZHI ART MUSEUM (No. 1 junshan Road, Xinjin, Chengdu)
Curator: Wang Conghui
Zhi Art Museum is pleased to present Han Mengyun’s solo exhibition What Migrates Shall Remain, which opens from December 15th 2024 until May 18th 2025. As the title suggests, the exhibition aims to showcase the transcultural foundation of Han Mengyun’s art practice, as well as the field and academic research that grounds her work. At the heart of the exhibition lies the Mirror Pavilion, an architectural installation inspired by an ancient tale of “The competition between Chinese and Rum artists” retold by poets such as Nizami Ganjavi in his Khamsa and Jalal al-Din Rumi in his Masnavi. The story goes that Alexander the Great, hearing that both the Romans and the Chinese were famous for their painting, wanted to see who in the world was the best. He then summoned a Roman and a Chinese painter to compete in the royal hall on two opposing walls. By the end of the competition, two identical paintings emerged. The Roman painting was splendid in its incredible realism and vividness while the Chinese painter did not paint but simply polished the wall into a mirror, through which the Roman’s painting across the room and the world were reflected.
First shown in the inaugural Diriyah Biennale (2021), The Pavilion of Three Mirrors aims to render an abstract and poetic representation of this ancient story, which provides many insights into the different conceptions of visual representations
between cultures. The work also sheds light on the premodern history of cultural exchange that goes unnoticed in our present time, while offering an alternative paradigm of image-making through the rediscovery of a shared legacy across cultures.
In addition to the pavilion, the exhibition comprises 25 Rules of Grammar, a series of 25 painted panels, alongside two archive tables. Utilizing woodblock stamps Han Mengyun collected in India in 2020, she reinterprets traditional motifs, stamping directly onto canvas in varied compositions. Treating the stamps as brushes, she reconfigures these patterns into novel semantic structures, creating a tapestry of her unique visual lexicon. This experimental use of woodblocks is further embodied in The Interpretations of Dreams, a series of paintings surrounding the Mirror Pavilion, where brick-patterned blocks evoke architectural spaces and forms.
The two archive tables display woodblocks collected in Jaipur, India, and China, along with photographic documentation from her field research in Indian textile workshops in 2020. Woodcut printing, one of humanity’s earliest and most significant technological and artistic innovations, has profoundly shaped global cross-cultural history. Its development paralleled that of papermaking, which originated during China’s Han Dynasty and revolutionized information preservation and transmission. As woodcut printing traveled along ancient trade routes, it linked China with Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, catalyzing a vast network of exchange.
The cross-cultural history of woodcut printing illustrates the adaptability of art across borders and through time. Its transience and resilience allowed it to evolve uniquely in each new region it reached. By engaging with this ever evolving tradition, Han Mengyun participates in a transcultural, transhistorical dialogue that has fostered a globally shared cultural legacy.
The second archival table showcases manuscript folios and paintings that Han has studied through various museum digital collections. This selection includes Ragamalapaintings, folios from the Kalpasutra, Mughal botanical illustrations, Christian
manuscript illustrating the five wounds of Christ, and folios of Kalila wa Dimna, a collection of animal fables originating from the Indian Panchatantra. These manuscripts, spanning diverse regions and traditions, illuminate Han Mengyun’s
visual influences and research pathways. To contextualize her scholarly and creative approach, she has curated a reading list of academic articles and books on Persian studies, Islamic and Indian art history, global art history, and the histories of paper, manuscripts, and the Silk Road, as well as works by Jorge Luis Borges and Abbas Kiarostami.
These selected works by Han Mengyun echo the transcultural history of the murals inside the Guanyin Temple in Xinjin, where the Zhi Art Museum is located. The Tantric images that occupy the central position in the murals can be traced back to the written or oral translations of religious scriptures from India. These images crystallized through the hands of Chinese painters who fused Tantric pictorial and sculptural imagery with Chinese monks’ interpretations of their meaning. Han Mengyun's exploration of folk craftsmanship outside the dominant literati painting tradition and her research on the migration of folklore also correspond to the cultural significance of the Guanyin Temple murals. From the Thousand-armed Guanyin in the Sanskrit Tantric scriptures, through the translation and rendition by Chinese painters, to the popularization and evolution of the Guanyin image in Chinese folk legends—which finally crystallized in the Guanyin Temple murals—these complex and vibrant transcultural histories are at the heart of Han Mengyun's art practice and intellectual inquiries.
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