Han Mengyun’s solo exhibition The Unending Rose, presented at ShanghART in 2023, marks the second iteration of her ongoing project Mirror Pavilion. The work draws upon the allegorical tale of the “Competition Between Chinese and Rum Artists,” as recounted in the Khamsa of Niẓāmī Ganjavi and later in Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Masnavi. In the narrative, Alexander the Great summons a Roman and a Chinese painter to determine artistic mastery. Each is assigned a wall: the Roman produces a meticulously rendered image, while the Chinese painter, having painted nothing, polishes his wall into a mirror that reflects both the opposing image and the surrounding world.

First commissioned for the inaugural Diriyah Biennale in 2021, The Pavilion of Three Mirrors does not illustrate this tale but activates its conceptual implications. The work probes questions of representation, perception, and knowledge as they circulate across cultures, foregrounding a premodern history of exchange in which artistic ideas moved fluidly across regions. It proposes an alternative genealogy of image-making grounded in shared imaginaries rather than linear influence.

In The Unending Rose, the mirrored architecture acquires an expanded conceptual role through its dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths. For Han, Borges functions as a kind of mirror: a writer deeply shaped by diverse intellectual traditions—Daoism, Buddhism, Islam—whose work embodies cultural hybridity and recursive self-reflection. In reading Borges, Han encounters a structure of thought that mirrors her own artistic condition. The installation thus resonates with Borges’s conception of time as branching and simultaneous, where multiple realities coexist rather than resolve into a single narrative.

As viewers move through the mirrored vaults, reflections multiply and dissolve, producing shifting relations between image, space, and observer. Perception becomes contingent and relational, shaped by movement and positionality. The mirror operates not merely as a reflective surface but as a generative structure—one that produces parallel visual paths and sustains difference. In this way, The Unending Rose articulates a mode of seeing grounded in multiplicity, reciprocity, and ongoing transformation.