HAN BING: Company
Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Company, a series of new paintings by artist HAN Bing. This show marks the artist’s first exhibition in Europe.
Comprising seven large scale canvases and five smaller paintings on wood and newsprint, this series continues the artist’s exploration of painting as a means of processing the urban environment and her experiences within them. These works largely reference the city of New York, where the artist has studied and lived for the majority of the past decade.
Han Bing’s peripatetic upbringing has left her particularly attuned to the ‘fragile, ephemeral compositions’ found within the urban landscape, such as the multi-layered peeled off posters often seen plastered on subway platforms, or the ubiquitous panels of forest green scaffolding. Roaming the city with her camera, the artist claims these precarious topographies as her own, which constitute the source material for the sweeping landscapes on view. The accidental street collages, and subsequently Han Bing’s paintings, are a resonant metaphor for the nature of the city, and the instability of place, itself.
Indeed, all of the works in the exhibition reflect real places, moments, and experiences across Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. As such, Company constitutes a sort of global time capsule, mediated through the personal lens of memory and longing. As we anxiously wait for our collective urban lives to resume, Han Bing’s paintings ultimately invite us to reflect on how the contexts and contents we consume shape us, and how these give form to our own sense of place in the world.
Dates: 11 May – 19 June 2021
Artist: HAN Bing
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Art historian Lucy Lippard defines ‘place’ as a location replete with layers of time and space, histories and memories. Place is shaped by ‘what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.'1 The paradoxical sense of place — at once boundlessness and specific — is evoked by Han Bing’s formal approach.
Just as the street collages collapse time, marking a specific yet fleeting moment in the residual accretion of life in a given site, these paintings collapse surface and ground. Rendered in the mutable medium of oil paint through an array of applications ranging from drawing, squeegeeing, and rubbing, these vessels confront the viewer with compounded planes that dance between light and dark, flatness and depth, opacity and transparency, representation and abstraction.
1 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 1997. p.7
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In Lorelei and Steed (both 2020), loose concrete-hued swaths, punctuated by that ever-present scaffolding green, give way to dense, sinuous forms like recessed interiors teeming with tableaux of their own. The life-size dimensions of these landscapes beckon us inside their illusory depths.
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Han Bing’s cityscapes brim with the frictional energy generated by these disjunctive elements, invoking the bustle of cities like New York, in which even a marginalized individual can find themselves woven into its ever-shifting fabric.
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Lippard notes that a sense of place is symbiotically related to a sense of displacement. To harness a sense of place, as Han Bing does with these paintings, is to claim a ‘kind of intellectual property, a way for nonbelongers to belong, momentarily.’
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© HAN Bing. Photo: Duo Lin
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Inquire available works by Han Bing
