Solo Exhibition ShanghART Singapore, Singapore
ShanghART Singapore is pleased to present Jewels of Impermanence, London-based artist Han Mengyun’s first solo exhibition in the gallery’s Singapore space. The title is borrowed from a poem the artist penned amid the unsettling spring of 2020. The show gathers a selection of paintings and drawings made between 2020 and 2025, providing a scintillating, at times enigmatic, glimpse into the artist’s pandemic-era turmoil and the spiritual composure she forged through an aesthetic meditation on impermanence.
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.”
Jewels of Impermanence
In the silent altar of the mind,
the soul awakens to whisper words of truth.
That’s the gift from disasters,
a garland of quietude.
There is neither past nor future.
The present is forever present.
That is also my present.
May the song of birds break the dawn.
May fear manifest itself as mere illusion.
The siege of clouds fails to capture
the night-dwelling moon, whose mission
is to reveal the veracity of light and compassion.
My mind becomes clear and still,
like a pond holding moonlight,
like a mirror polished in the river.
The ancient Persians wear poetry like jewelry,
I take impermanence as treasury of light
shedding on the vicissitudes of life.
- Han Mengyun
About Han Mengyun
Han Mengyun (b. 1989 in Wuhan, raised in Shenzhen, China) is an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist, comparatist, filmmaker, poet and mother currently based in London. She received BA in Studio Art from Bard College and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories. Han Mengyun's practice is metaphorically divided between Day and Night, exploring a wide range of themes from the decolonization of Eurasian transcultural hybridizations to personal experiences as a woman and mother.
During the "day," Han Mengyun focuses on painting, diverging from Eurocentric frameworks—both classical and contemporary—to delve into the complex historical ties within the profoundly intercultural context of Eurasia's past and present. Initially trained in the Western tradition of oil painting, she shifted towards embracing the complexities of historical ties and intercultural dialogues that have shaped the continent's history. The broad focus of her research covers interdisciplinary manifestations of cultural dialogue and polyvocal aesthetic conversations—from religion, philosophy, and mythologies to trade, vernacular crafts, textile and bookmaking.
During the "night," Han Mengyun explores her personal, emotional, and psychological experiences as a woman and a mother. Her affinity for the night developed from an uncontrollable desire to write poems in darkness during episodes of postpartum depression. The night emancipated her and inspired her écriture féminine. Her feminist awareness and radical solidarity were kindled by Gayatri Spivak's critical concern for the subaltern, the contradictions of existence as double binds caused by colonialism and modernity, and creative play as non-compliance. From writing and filmmaking to painting and textile installation—often merging these forms—her Night Practice examines women's experiences, utterances, and art forms in transgenerational, transcultural, transhistorical, and inter-religious contexts, probing the roots of subalternity and the possibilities of liberation.
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