QINGSHAN HAN

Til HAN Qingshan(韓青杉) is an unrealised being dedicated to taking an active investigation into the potential of unrecognised, unfinished, or unfulfilled forms of life. 

The body we inhabits has yet to realise or remain unaware of.

My practice revolves around the ontological proposition of the unrealised being.

I am interested in the notion that our sense of ourselves is completely amorphous despite our physical limitations as human beings. The freedom to transform and to reincarnate perhaps is something that we are looking for from state to state, from century to century. 

Drawing on the sources of Thangka and fresco from arcane Tibetan Buddhism, I focused on the recurring life circulation and incarnations of being. Rendering diaphanous washes of oil paint, these haunting compositions constructed without a sketch, and the fugitive motifs are reverberates across the paintings and depict ethereal musings. ''To paint is first to accept this essential loss of agency, to relinquish certain intentionality and tenuously circumnavigate this centrifuge of potential images which furnishes the degree zero of a composition.'' The figures are fluid and shared the same organs and body as if they are searching for the speculative substantiality of the amorphous biomorph.

The life formation started from a pool of water, just like the imaginal disc inside a pupa metamorphosis into a butterfly. The construction of figures in the painting is slow and unexpected. The traces and marks that were previously left act as new clues and lead to the next formation. Each decision-making in paintings is like playing chess, one followed the other, slowly unfolds and multiplies, and the variable takes shapes radically.

The works aim to create a space and context for this submitted information, a space where biomorph forms are at the fore, are not fixed in a final product, and rely on the capacity of a human psychological being to be 'realised'. But how can we empower our qualia or sensibility to constitute other realities and go beyond the phenomenon? Or perhaps, what we are looking for is already within us.

In the recent attempt, Black, Gold Politic, I try to create a syntax for an opening to address issues in the power dynamic contexts and personal experience of it. ‘How one is charged with power and status, what is coded what is not’. By reinserting myself into the enmeshment with a checkerboard-liked matrix, seeing my position in this society and dynamic identities always in flux and aggressively shift from groundedness experiences, power, and roles that registered and sublate within this nexus. How this collective network relates to future memories and irresistible growth is the subject that my practice engaged in.