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Photography (MA)

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.


Show Location: Battersea campus: Dyson & Woo Buildings, First floor

Time Being

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.

The Rise of the New Force, Oil on linen
The Rise of the New Force, Oil on linen
The Rise of the New Force, Oil on linen
The Rise of the New Force, Oil on linen
The Rise of the New Force, Oil on linen

The indifferent figures stood behind the mother, celebrating the implied danger and aggression of the new power.

Accouchement is a state where females urge and surrender their power at the same time.

The hesitant fingers, concerned face, and vacant eyes are the most immediate response when sensing the threat. 

The fear of newcomers, replacement and new forces arouse restlessness.

After all, obscure sorrow and latent hollowness are the reapings of the unjustified power.

Medium:

Oil on linen

Size:

100 x 80 cm
Birds born in a Cage think Flying is an Illness, Oil on linen
Birds born in a Cage think Flying is an Illness, Oil on linen
Birds born in a Cage think Flying is an Illness, Oil on linen
Birds born in a Cage think Flying is an Illness, Oil on linen
Birds born in a Cage think Flying is an Illness, Oil on linen

''You may still misread the signs; you may still cling to vacant facts, rotted histories, arcane fantasies. Perhaps this cannot be helped. Nevertheless, the stubborn persistence of collective inertia and its silent partner, fear, cannot be underestimated"

Johnny Golding, The Courage to Matter.


Medium:

Oil on linen

Size:

75 x 85 cm
Black Gold Politic, Lithographs, Screen prints, Photo Etching on metals, UV print on Brass
Black Gold Politic, Lithographs, Screen prints, Photo Etching on metals, UV print on Brass
Black Gold Politic, Lithographs, Screen prints, Photo Etching on metals, UV print on Brass

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 aggressively take the shape of groundedness experiences, power, and roles that registered and sublate within this nexus, how this matrix relates to future memories and irresistible growth is the subject that my practice engaged.





Medium:

Lithographs, Screen prints, Photo Etching on metals, UV print on Brass

Size:

Varies
1, from Hanging Scrolls
1, from Hanging Scrolls
1, from Hanging Scroll
1, from Hanging Scroll
2, from Hanging Scrolls
2, from Hanging Scrolls
2, from Hanging Scrolls
2, from Hanging Scrolls
3, from Hanging Scrolls
3, from Hanging Scrolls
3, from Hanging Scrolls
3, from Hanging Scrolls

To pursue the “true development of an old tradition”, I am in an attempt to produce an alternative material culture, from scroll paintings to another way of reading the hanging object. Hanging Scrolls are essential in a strict and ancient Tea house culture and act as Tibetian mobile Budda status.

I would like to propose a model for thinking about this, suggesting that the images of the body are a kind of three-dimensional shape that is constantly shifting and unsettling images are all on the surface. And perhaps we are not living in a world that is smooth but rather an inconsistent space and we filled up the holes with our own imaginations. As such, we need to constantly rethink and remodel our senses and qualia.



Medium:

textile, print, brush, remote shutter release, brass rod, photographic print, patchwork brocade

Size:

varies
Webbed Glove
Webbed Glove40 x 50 cm, 2021
07, from Unrealised Beings
07, from Unrealised Beings 44 x 33 cm, 2022
22, from Unrealised Beings
22, from Unrealised Beings 50 x 40 cm, 2021
Loot
Loot100 x 80 cm , 2022

Medium:

Oil and gold pigments on wood panel, linen

Size:

Varies
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I always searched for but quickly surrender to chance encounters...