The Unbearable Purity: Three Stories

2025

multimedia installation:

Video projection, Dong bright cloth, cast aluminum branches, stainless steel Dong-inspired benches, handmade paper fans

Video duration: 11 minutes 9 seconds, color, stereo sound, loop

*The work is supported and commissioned by Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile, Hong Kong for the exhibition Lining Revealed – A Journey Through Folk Wisdom and Contemporary Vision

15 March – 13 July 2025

Han Mengyun’s Night Practice critically engages with intersectional feminism by using Dong minority textiles as a medium to probe values of labour and mechanism of oppression by enacting the creative value of darkness often associated with femininity. In her multimedia work The Unbearable Purity: Three Stories commissioned by CHAT, Han furthers this exploration by questioning the mechanisms of value-building in domestic spheres as well as textile traditions in Dong villages in China and Jaipur India.

The work begins with the artist’s conversation with a Dong woman, who reveals the shift in the Dong community from producing handmade textiles to buying industrially made fabric, alleviating the intense labour required to sustain cultural identity through traditional textile-making. In the second story, the artist’s monologue launches a reflection on domestic cleaning as a form of control, invoking the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s seminal work Purity and Danger: what constitutes the definition of cleanliness is not the actual hygiene itself, but the conception of purity and moral order by patriarchal structures that underlie cultural framework. The last story travels back in time to the artist’s field trip to Jaipur India in 2020 where she conducted research on the local textile industry and the tradition of woodblock printing. Her visit to a workshop that utilizes silkscreen to produce manually printed effect on textile led to her contemplation on her own William Morris-like fetishization of the human touch on craftwork in relation to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura before the era of mechanical reproduction. The bodily pain she experiences while using the woodblock for her own painting reminds her that this manual beauty comes at a risk and price. Through an internal intertextual dialogue on the intersection of culture, labor, and gender, these 3 narratives challenge the enduring over-glorification of manual labor by probing how modernization complicates the making of values, be it cultural, ethnic, aesthetic or emotional.

Different from the artist’s previous works utilizing the Dong bright cloth to create an installation surrounding the moving image, The Unbearable Purity: Three Stories projects the moving image directly onto the fabric, activating the luminosity afforded by the egg white applied over the surface. The blurriness of the video image on the fabric is compensated by the paper handheld fans provided to the visitors which act like mobile microscopic device facilitating while also making visible the movement of the eyes. But only to the surprise of the spectator once the fan is inserted in front of the projection, scenes of chaos and waste, boredom and endlessness of domestic labour greet the eyes.