TO BELONG MOMENTARILY
THE PRECARIOUS TOPOGRAPHIES OF HAN BING
The contemporary painter Han Bing is a collector of impressions, mining meaning in both actual and perceived moments of aesthetic pleasure. She has made an extended study of the nature of the urban sphere as an environment in which the naked facts of American culture, commercial imagery from cultural sources, physical objects in an ever mutable landscape of perspectival encounter, and the mass of people who surrounded her, each living their own lives but also contributing their visages and gestures to the subject matter that would feed into her creative work. Bing is a wanderer in the classical sense, a Flaneur whose undirected journeys generate abstract images as a visual language for the lost.
New York City, where Bing resided for several years while studying and developing her mature new works, is immense and often chaotic. It’s the product of many generations and many ethnicities converging in the same locality. She lived in various neighborhoods, in both Manhattan and Queens, vantage points from which she could observe and make a finite study of the superficial visual elements and everyday activities of the city and people around her. She took many photographs of construction sheds, bus stop advertisements, and people moving in the streets and subways, some fast, some slow, creating a hodge-podge of dynamic action that resembles the colors moving quickly through a kaleidoscope.
Bing takes these images and begins to paint them, at first naturalistically, and then as time passes, she deconstructs them, making note of the dominant colors on hand, creating a subconscious lexicon of chromatically directed gestures, and reconstructing vast areas of each canvas to play off the movements or poses, of the colors dominating each scene in memory, and translates them into painterly tropes. Now and then she introduces a figure, so obscured that if not for overt physicality, they might otherwise be mistaken for just another painterly construction in an overall abstract picture. Bing relies upon our instincts toward certain forms and colors, which anchor us within a complex riddle of perception.
Bing’s work is complex and interior, each layer as it is applied responding to the other layers around them. Her colors and gestures Looking for what is contextually ‘other,’ Bing finds not only superficial details to translate into painterly purposes, but also the deeper meanings that an urban metropolis and a canvas filled with imagery both ultimately share. Painting is a discipline, the imposition of order through layers of applied meaning. It creates objects that are more than the sum of their parts, obscure and complex; but it also imposes, one painting at a time, that discipline upon the broader context of existence.Â
Works such as Lorelei and Steed (both 2020) present us with imposing foregrounded figures completing dramatic gestures that fulfill some psychological need to play out narratives upon a blank landscape, like little ideas coming to life slowly, with each gesture creating more energy. There are intentional gaps in the composition, voids that allow for narrative slippage. They place her suggestive figures in the foreground, lost in their own apparent realities, they play no part for the viewer. They are as cold as shop window mannequins. We can at any time lose the logic of the picture. Other works such as Don’t Stop Keep Going and Solar Eclipse in Chinatown (both 2021) present foregrounds crammed with sensory detail, narrating undeniable dramas that she recreates as stream of consciousness jigsaw puzzles. They are picaresque if not outrightly bathetic. The bright colors and extreme angles play to our senses.
There is a reserve to Bing’s discipline, a resistance to easy metaphor and emotional responses to her work. She wants to make dense and demanding works that possess the rigor of a philosophical treatise or a scientific equation, bespeaking greater dimensions of reality that are not apparent until one finds themselves thoroughly mired in the thicket of intentions. Yet they are also not declarations against anything. They are an attempt to possess the world all at once, to hold the ephemeral in a tentative embrace. For the artist is no foreigner in the world of the real, a transient perhaps, but a willful one, filling up and then escaping into the incubator of the study to compose perfect models of life.
This new collection of innovative works by painter Han Bing addresses the ambiguous relationship that art has to reality, and the artist’s role, or duty, in fulfilling art’s ability to transform not only scenes of choice for eventual aesthetic delectation, but as a means of allowing the art curious to see how Bing sees; to drift among impressions, to reconstitute trite forms within an idiosyncratic process that remodels and renames them within nature. The artist allows us to wander, and to discover profoundly new essential relationships to the world in which we live, reason, and recognize ourselves.Â