| The artistic universe of HAN Hongsu is based on an understanding of ambivalence. Caught between two worlds, wandering to and from between the polar opposites of East and the West, figuration and abstraction, eternity and the present, the ideal and reality, art and the life of an artist, that which is transcendent and that which is secular, the sexual and the spiritual. For HAN Hongsu, the act of painting is the act of accepting ambivalence, of bringing together two polar opposites, which refuse to co-exist.
After 30 years of living in France, the artist returned to his motherland, working solidly during two years of a global pandemic. If his previous work featured a multitude of colourful layered tones, and were once described as “canvases on which angels tread,” his recent series, De la Nature, restricts itself to the primitive tones of black and white as a method to express nature, activated through repeated motions of painting and emptying. Paradoxically, these works illuminate the artist's unique technique more splendidly than ever before.
The artist wakes up at the same time every day and with the exception of completing a self-portrait, eating, and sleeping, spends a full 12 hours in meditative training in his quest to uncover the essence of Nature. As the world confronted unprecedented chaos from manmade or natural disasters, the artist returned to his studio each day in a solitary fight to confront the most fundamental elements of art.
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The artistic universe of HAN Hongsu is based on an understanding of ambivalence. Caught between two worlds, wandering to and from between the polar opposites of East and the West, figuration and abstraction, eternity and the present, the ideal and reality, art and the life of an artist, that which is transcendent and that which is secular, the sexual and the spiritual. For HAN Hongsu, the act of painting is the act of accepting ambivalence, of bringing together two polar opposites, which refuse to co-exist.
After 30 years of living in France, the artist returned to his motherland, working solidly during two years of a global pandemic. If his previous work featured a multitude of colourful layered tones, and were once described as “canvases on which angels tread,” his recent series, De la Nature, restricts itself to the primitive tones of black and white as a method to express nature, activated through repeated motions of painting and emptying. Paradoxically, these works illuminate the artist's unique technique more splendidly than ever before.
The artist wakes up at the same time every day and with the exception of completing a self-portrait, eating, and sleeping, spends a full 12 hours in meditative training in his quest to uncover the essence of Nature. As the world confronted unprecedented chaos from manmade or natural disasters, the artist returned to his studio each day in a solitary fight to confront the most fundamental elements of art.