Han Mengyun: Jewels of Impermanence

Singapore, May 2025 — ShanghART Singapore is pleased to present Jewels of Impermanence, London-based artist Han Mengyun’s first solo exhibition in the gallery’s Singapore space. The title is borrowed from a poem the artist penned amid the unsettling spring of 2020. The show gathers a selection of paintings and drawings made between 2020 and 2025, providing a scintillating, at times enigmatic, glimpse into the artist’s pandemic-era turmoil and the spiritual composure she forged through an aesthetic meditation on impermanence.

Han’s images stage an encounter between Dutch vanitas paintings and Buddhist depictions of skeletons and skulls. Whereas vanitas and memento mori traditions expose worldly vanity, Buddhist “meditations on repulsiveness” confront impermanence as a precondition of enlightenment. Interweaving iconographies through a repertoire of skulls, hourglasses, and other emblems of transience, Han constructs mandala-like configurations, printed with woodblocks she has collected across Asia. The mandala serves as a phenomenological prism—an architectonic map through which both the macrocosm and the psyche can be apprehended. Such material and visual hybridity stages a tension between sensuous surface and metaphysical aspiration. Works such as Spaß und Tod, with its skeletal hands poised in play, recall the late-medieval danse macabre and Tibetan thangka of the citipati, acknowledging death as a kinetic partner in the continuum of life and the catalyst of existential transformation.

The series marks the artist’s return to oil painting which she rejected for almost a decade in search of the alternative to ‘the Western’. “In the prospect of grim uncertainty”, the artist says, “I felt an urgent craving for the corporeal lusciousness of oil, the exhilarating violence of the brush, the humble endurance of canvas—capacities ink and rice paper cannot sustain. In this existential aporia, I understood for the first time the Heideggerean Sein-zum-Tode, being-toward-death—the unflinching awareness of finitude makes life infinitely possible.”

Jewels of Impermanence

In the silent altar of the mind, the soul awakens to whisper words of truth. That’s the gift from disasters, a garland of quietude. There is neither past nor future. The present is forever present. That is also my present. May the song of birds break the dawn. May fear manifest itself as mere illusion. The siege of clouds fails to capture the night-dwelling moon, whose mission is to reveal the veracity of light and compassion. My mind becomes clear and still, like a pond holding moonlight, like a mirror polished in the river. The ancient Persians wear poetry like jewelry, I take impermanence as treasury of light shedding on the vicissitudes of life.

~ Han Mengyun