It was a rare piece of good fortune to be able to speak with Han Mengyun. Our conversation unfolded from the sun’s westering to the onset of night. Over the course of those shifting hours of light and shadow, guided by Han’s narration, we moved—almost as if in a single breath—from Shenzhen to the east coast of the United States, to Kyoto, to Oxford, and onward to the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula.

One must admit: Han Mengyun is someone who truly understands the sorcery of language. She moves with ease among multiple tongues—Japanese, English, and French, which she began learning in adolescence, and later Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. And just as language itself acknowledges no borders, her journey through languages seems destined to continue.

Through her experience of crossing cultures and languages, Han has discovered a grammar for her painting, and a language of her own—at once steadfast and tender. The steadfastness comes from the intellectual sediment built up through daily study over time; the tenderness, meanwhile, rests on a capacious embrace of difference, and of all that is unknowable and unsayable. This tenderness calls to mind what the Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—whom Han cites more than once—names the translator’s love: a “love that permits fraying” between the original and its shadow.

Deeply shaped by Spivak, Han regards all her work as a kind of translational act: moving between linguistic systems; translating the past into the present; translating books into paintings, and experience into poetry… No translation between this shore and the other can ever be perfect. Yet cultural borders have never been an unfordable river. As Han believes, the world is an indivisible whole, and the translator’s task is to awaken a love for difference.

Lai Fei: What first prompted your interest in studying different languages and cultures?

Han Mengyun: In many ways, my upbringing is closely tied to China’s Reform and Opening-Up. I was born in Wuhan, and when I was four my parents and I moved to Shenzhen. Shenzhen really did merit its reputation as a “Window to the World”: it faces Hong Kong, and through Hong Kong one could reach the wider world. This once-barren land also made possible a kind of liberation from the shackles of history—an imagination of the future no longer confined by the past.

My earliest way of encountering the world was through Hong Kong television channels, which allowed me to imagine Japan—and to become utterly captivated by it. Wanting to watch more Japanese animation, I told my father I wanted to learn Japanese. My father had studied many languages—Japanese, French, Russian, and others. His multilingual ability gave me an early revelation: that it was possible to command several languages, read many kinds of books, and encounter different ways of life.

Around the end of middle school, I met a remarkable teacher. He was Japanese; in his early years he studied advanced mathematics in France, then travelled the world, teaching Japanese part-time, before eventually settling in Shenzhen. His Japanese class had a profound impact on me—it felt like a second family. Many of the students were migrant workers from across the country who had come to Shenzhen for work. The age range was wide: there were people in their twenties and thirties, and also younger workers from rural areas. Studying Japanese alongside working-class adults at fourteen made me acutely aware of social class differences—and of their extraordinary drive and capacity to learn. For a fourteen-year-old, learning in that environment was singular. It revealed to me a completely different community within Shenzhen. It was one of the strange and vivid experiences produced by China’s collision with the world under Reform and Opening-Up.

Lai Fei: Why were these workers learning Japanese in Shenzhen?

Han Mengyun: At the time, many Japanese companies operated in Shenzhen and Dongguan, and Japanese could open up job opportunities. My teacher was outstanding. He rarely used textbooks; instead, he would lead discussions directly in Japanese on all kinds of topics—social issues in Japan and around the world, as well as science and mathematics. In that seminar-like setting, we didn’t just learn Japanese; we learned how to think in Japanese.

That small, shabby classroom in Shenzhen became my window onto the outside world. Through my teacher, I encountered the world as he saw it—his perspectives and critiques of Japan, cultural differences between nations, and the possibility of communication across them. Those childhood experiences laid the groundwork for my utopian imagination of plurality and borderlessness.

In his classroom it felt as if boundaries—class boundaries, national borders—fell away. What remained were encounters between individuals: inevitable conflicts, and attempts at reconciliation. In discussions of social issues, I often confronted positions entirely different from my own, which made me more aware of my social location and privilege. My teacher charged the migrant workers only a nominal fee, hoping they could learn well and build better futures. From him I learned the importance of ethical responsibility and educational fairness. He shaped me profoundly, intellectually and as a person. It was a pivotal experience. He also taught me French. Because he had lived in France for ten years, his French was fluent—so, in a sense, I learned French through Japanese. China’s exam-oriented education could not satisfy my insatiable curiosity, so I used weekends to build the alternative classroom I longed for. That same effort and experimentation later extended to many other disciplines and fields of study.

Lai Fei: What was your introduction to painting like? And how did painting become a way for you to begin learning different cultures and languages?

Han Mengyun: I started taking extracurricular art classes in primary school. Art training in China is extremely intensive. Around my first year of high school, I decided I wanted to become an artist. After transferring to Shenzhen Art School in my second year, I began studying drawing within the school curriculum, and that was when I developed a strong resistance to exam-driven techniques. Choosing to attend Bard College, a liberal arts college in the United States, satisfied my rebellious impulse. There was no exam-based critical system there: you could paint freely, with far fewer constraints. At the time, abstract painting was dominant on the U.S. East Coast, especially around New York. The topics my classmates discussed, the exhibitions we visited, and the work students made were almost all centered on abstraction. As a result, I developed a strong interest in abstract art during college—both as research and as practice. Abstraction demands firsthand experience: only when you begin making work do you really understand the relationships between colors, the movement of the eye, formal language, and so on. For me at that time, working through abstraction was a profound liberation. By the end of my senior year, my own abstract style had gradually taken shape. But I also began to ask myself: what did it mean for me, as a Chinese person, to imitate postwar American art? It became clear that my classmates and I differed markedly in temperament, interests, and aesthetic inclinations. I was also taking courses in East Asian Studies, and I found myself strongly attuned to Eastern culture. Yet when I tried to discuss these questions with American teachers and classmates, it was difficult to establish any real resonance. I felt lonely—but that loneliness also pointed me toward a path. I began to realize that my cultural background compelled my work to diverge from others, to take on different forms and seek different meanings.

At the time, I was searching for a form of abstraction that could better express me as someone shaped by multiple cultural experiences. I began studying Chinese art history and Buddhism. To learn Chinese painting, I felt I had to understand Daoist and Buddhist thought, because they profoundly shaped the forms and intellectual foundations of Chinese painting. And gradually I became aware that, even after learning so much, a certain confusion remained. Sinological writing produced in the West often carried a strange exoticism, a gaze I could not comprehend. That indescribable discomfort forced me to think about what was at stake.

Lai Fei: During this phase, was painting always at the center of your studies?

Han Mengyun: Yes. Although I took courses in many different media, painting remained my main focus. Later, when I pursued an MFA in Fine Art at the University of Oxford, I began working with multimedia—something that later became an important direction. After graduating from Bard, I continued in the U.S. for an MFA program, but I dropped out fairly quickly. Surrounded by Western classmates and teachers, I found it difficult to communicate about the cultural issues that mattered to me. At that time, I also developed a strong skepticism toward American and Western culture more broadly, so I left and returned to China to devote myself to traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy.

Lai Fei: Had you studied Chinese painting before going abroad?

Han Mengyun: Not at all. It was only when I began learning it that I started to examine the situation I had taken for granted: why was it that I—a Chinese person—had only learned sketching? You could say I realized this belatedly. While you are inside the process of learning, you rarely have full awareness of it. Only after time has passed—after you’ve gone elsewhere, and looked back at your identity and experience from another vantage point—do you begin to see the paradoxes that have long been normalized. And to work through those paradoxes, you have to understand the truths on both sides of the conflict. Like learning a new language, I began studying calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting. In that process I gradually understood that the principles of Western and Chinese painting are fundamentally different. They involve the state of the muscles when handling the brush, the condition of the body and mind, the role of chance, and so on. This gave me a deeper sense of cultural difference—and of how painting can become a dialectical way of engaging it.

Meanwhile, my fascination with Buddhism continued. Many Buddhist texts were hard for me to understand—especially writings on Chinese Buddhism produced by Western scholars. I began to feel that I needed to study Buddhism’s source languages in order to understand it more fully. Because I had learned many languages, I came to see language as one of the crucial routes toward understanding what is real. So, in a rather naïve way, I began studying Sanskrit—training at different institutions in Germany, Japan, and Oxford. In Kyoto University, I studied Sanskrit intensively for a full year: it demanded more than ten hours a day. Sanskrit is a sacred clerical language, developed specifically for scripture; it is highly complex, and that complexity allows it to express and clarify extremely subtle concepts. That affected me deeply. Buddhist scriptures were first recorded in Pali, but later Sanskrit was also used, so many canonical texts exist in both languages. Years of meticulous Sanskrit study not only deepened my understanding of Buddhism; it also opened up the vast cultural sphere of the Indian subcontinent. Through Indian culture, I became interested in Islamic culture—especially Islam in India. I also developed a strong fascination with Persian and Arabic literature and art, particularly manuscripts.

This was a long process. Through learning different cultures, I gradually developed a new paradigm: a decolonial way of thinking, one that consciously sets aside the Western gaze and its definitions of “the Chinese artist,” and learns instead to understand the various images of China produced from different perspectives across different periods—recognizing that each is, in a sense, an imagination. There is no absolutely “real” China. Once we begin to define it, it becomes abstract and imprecise—and that abstraction often arises from the limits of language, which cannot fully grasp what exceeds language.

Lai Fei: I’m reminded of something you wrote: “China is a synonym for the unknown, the distant, the mysterious—the utopia that contains wisdom and produces miracles. The word can mean everything, or nothing at all. It can become what it is not. It can be what I wish it to be. The emptiness and futility of definition and language set me free.”

Han Mengyun: Sanskrit is a sacred religious language, used primarily to write scriptures. Its complexity makes it especially capable of expressing and interpreting difficult, subtle concepts. Buddhist scriptures were first recorded in Pali, and later also in Sanskrit. Several years of close Sanskrit study not only deepened my understanding of Buddhism; it also fully opened the path for me to explore the cultural world of the Indian subcontinent.

Through Indian culture I learned more about Islam in India, and about early histories of fusion between local Indian religions and Islam. This led to a deep interest in manuscripts that carried Persian and Arabic literature and painting. And through Indian and Islamic cultures, I came to know “another China”—no longer the China seen through a Western gaze, but a beautiful imagination of China formed within long histories of cultural exchange, as revealed in ancient texts.

In ancient India, Central Asia, and the Islamic world, discussions of images often emerged from myth, and were closely bound up with religion and culture. Images in that context were not “art” in the contemporary sense. Premodern discourses did not pursue what we now call “art history”—a framework that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe under colonial conditions. Many Indian and Islamic myths and poems discuss the meaning and transcendental power of images.

The openness of myth challenges the hegemony of the real. Myths can be reinterpreted endlessly—especially because folktales often have no single original author. Interpretive power is therefore returned entirely to the reader. Every reader becomes an interpreter and, in a sense, an author; the text becomes a site where voices across time meet, contend, and converse. To me, this is a crucial mode of art interpretation and thinking in the premodern, non-Western world: rather than accepting wholesale a supposedly definitive “historical event” of art (since history itself is also an ideological construction), I embrace the polysemic potential of texts—allowing art and literature to become inexhaustible, and in that openness, enduring.

My work The Pavilion of Three Mirrors (2021) is based on an ancient Persian folktale. The earliest version cannot be definitively identified, but it circulated orally for centuries. From around the twelfth century onward, people began writing it down; major poets such as Nizami and Rumi reinterpreted and retold it. This widely known Central Asian story showed me a completely new China: a China in myth, a China beyond Western definition and gaze.

For a long time, we have been steeped in “Western art history,” a discipline that only emerged in the eighteenth century, and in Eurocentric narratives that interpret and define so-called “non-Western” art—including, inevitably, “Chinese art history.” The China described there is both real and unreal. Because premodern Central Asia was a zone of intensive exchange, China did in fact appear within the cultural worlds of Rome, Central Asia, Persia, and the Arab world. Yet in this story, China is not China as such; it is an element that serves the narrative. The China of Central Asian myth is radically different from China as interpreted in the West. In these myths, China is imagined as a place of a certain openness—but it is, undeniably, an imagination. There was no direct channel through which Central Asians could fully know the “real” China. Arabic and Persian texts describe China and Chinese art in large numbers. Trade routes such as the Silk Road intensified exchange, and objects such as porcelain circulated—further enriching that imagination. China became, in their eyes, the place where all exquisite things were made; Chinese painters were regarded as the most accomplished of all.

Even if much of this was imagined, the imagination nonetheless shaped local art and culture. In Persian miniature painting, motifs such as cranes, lotus flowers, dragons, and phoenixes draw on Chinese painting and craft traditions, and even the handling of line was influenced by the meticulous linearity of gongbi. In a context of exchange and fusion like this, how could we cleanly distinguish one from another? The very concept of discrete individuals and discrete cultures simply does not hold.

Lai: After a long time training in Western painting, how did you absorb the influences and epistemologies of these different cultures, Indian and Islamic, in the language of your own painting?

Han: This is one of the essential challenges of my practice: how to identify these multicultural influences and combine them. It has been a long process. My study has traversed multiple fields, from Japanese language and culture to academic training in painting under the Soviet educational system. I then went to the United States and studied postwar American art, especially abstract painting. With discontent and a critical eye, I used to try to find the so-called root of my culture. Then, my obsession with the definition of root was completely dissolved by the study of Sanskrit and Buddhism. In the last few years, I have started to learn Persian and Arabic. These ancient languages have opened up an infinitely vast and deeply interconnected world for me, a space of thought where there would be no narrow-minded discussion about whether, for instance, “painting is dead.”

In addition to learning languages, I have explored alternative art histories and creative practices and attended various courses. There is a very special place in London called the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, which is sponsored by the King’s Foundation. It teaches a wide range of ancient crafts and traditional painting techniques from all over the world. The teachers come from a variety of different cultural backgrounds, including Chinese, Japanese, Arab, Persian, Pakistani, Turkish, Indian, and so on. The school’s existence is particularly intriguing in the current postcolonial era. Despite its controversial establishment, it is the only place in the world where one can learn all the ancient ways of creating art. I took courses in Indian and Persian miniatures painting, the preparatory processes of bookmaking, how to polish a manuscript page, bookbinding, woodcutting, ornamental carvings of the Qur’an bookstand, Indian botanical printing and textile dyeing, and more ancient Western painting techniques such as tempera. As I learnt these new techniques, I tried to expand on them through the forms of painting with which I am more familiar. Western painting, including the related education I received in China, is an influence I have no way to get rid of.

Lai: Modern art education in China might be a translation of Western modernism. On a practical level, its most direct manifestation in these decades has been the deeply ingrained painting paradigm of domestic painters.

Han: When I was in America, I tried to break away from this paradigm by painting abstraction. But if you give me a pencil and ask for a sketch, I will be able to do it right away. There is no way to get rid of this muscle memory, much like how riding a bike becomes second nature. After years of struggle, I decided to accept these influences within me. Embracing these influences wholeheartedly, I began to think about how they could merge. I attempted to merge features of Indian and Persian painting, such as decorative motifs, with Western oil painting, the medium in which I have been trained for decades. Yet, as I delved deeper, I discovered significant conflicts between these painting traditions and visualities.

Lai: Because their theories of knowledge, or epistemologies, are inherently different.

Han: Yes, I find it both challenging and fascinating. The scope of my comparison is no longer between the Western and Chinese. It has welcomed the Indian and Islamic perceptions to participate in the comparative scheme. From the so-called configuration of paintings, we can uncover vast differences in our epistemologies. This conflict attracts me; its irreconcilability inspires me to constantly seek reconciliation.

If the normative tradition of painting implies the rejection of heterogeneity (of class, taste, gender etc), can images, not traditionally considered paintings, have the potential to embrace the Other? Pursuing this thought, I reestablished my painting practice from the art of the manuscripts, books, and the images within them. Indian and Persian miniatures are usually found in manuscripts, closely related to the written text and inseparable from the book form. To call them simply illustrations is to dismiss their equal importance to their textual counterpart. These images aren’t meant to be hung on the wall like contemporary Western paintings. To trace the origins of these images, I delved into various ancient texts from digital archives online and physical collections in art galleries, museums, and private collections worldwide. My search covered ancient Indian palm-leaf manuscripts, Indian miniatures, the Qur’an, Perso-Islamic manuscripts, European medieval illuminated manuscripts, thread-bound books and woodblock printed books in China and Japan, and even Mesopotamian clay tablets, among others. Throughout the global manifestation of the book, the diversity of its forms has been absorbed into a single meta-media, and the Tower of Babel of humankind seems less unattainable. The book form was a revolutionary medium in the ancient world. Beginning with the invention of papermaking and movable-type printing in China, the configuration of the book we employ most commonly till this day was born; countless images and words were recorded and disseminated as a result, and this was one of the most important phenomena of globalization in ancient times. The book got me thinking about whether the experience of globalization in ancient times could provide some answers and solutions to the failures of globalization today.

Moreover, what makes the book so appealing to me is that it belongs to the people in the broadest sense, serving as the earliest medium of democracy. The book differs from Chinese literati painting in that it was made, used, circulated across classes and for all kinds of usage, beyond the royal and elite. While literati painting was quite exclusive in terms of social class, it nonetheless had a wider impact and gained recognition in Western academic circles, eventually becoming a representative form of Chinese art.

Lai: The fact that literati painting is considered “Artwork” is similar to the case of Western oil painting.

Han: I believe this is also an issue that needs to be addressed. If Chinese art is not limited to just Chinese ink painting, then what else can be included? As such, we must also pay attention to those “little traditions.” Indian-American scholar A.K. Ramanujan’s article, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” (1989) offers us many new dimensions of thinking about the weighty issue of tradition. He insightfully analyzes the many possibilities of this question: Is there an exclusively Indian way of thinking? Is there only one Indian thought? Are Indians capable of thinking? The multiple readings of a single question made the complexities of cultural definition manifest. He also talks about the rich diversity of Indian culture, with hundreds of languages, each officially recognized, not merely as dialects. In India, there are many “great” traditions and many “little” traditions, all of which together constitute what is considered the Indian way of thinking, the complexity, richness and even ambiguity of which is often inadequately acknowledge at the convenience of definition by the Western Eurocentric academia. Inspired by this essay, I began to employ the same methodology to question whether there is only one Chinese way of thinking or painting. The answer is: not really. China has its “great traditions” like literati painting, but also many “little traditions.” In his study of Chinese art history, sinologist and art historian Craig Clunas completely overturned the essentialist definition of Chinese art. Instead of focusing on an “essential” Chinese art, Clunas argues that we should consider all art creations that took place in China as Chinese art. This viewpoint breaks the Eurocentric framework. Thus, he titles his work not “History of Chinese Art” but “Art in China.” To support this view, he studied many folk arts and crafts, especially book making and the imagery within books. These can all be considered part of Chinese art.

I chose to do my MFA at the University of Oxford because I needed a program where I could study art alongside other disciplines. I don’t believe in the idea of “Art for art’s sake”, which denies the larger cultural contexts that gave birth to the form of art. Additionally, my Sanskrit professor from Kyoto University had taken a position at Oxford, so I decided to follow him there. He is Nepalese and was the first non-white scholar in the Oxford Sanskrit department in a long time. During our weekly one-on-one tutorial, I learned to read, analyze and translate ancient Sanskrit texts on art and aesthetic theories under his tutelage, which established a foundation of an alternative epistemology on art. Moreover, I was incredibly fortunate to catch Professor Craig Cluna’s last year of teaching before his retirement. Reading his works, I began to think about art history anew, especially about what lies beyond the “great” traditions of Chinese art. I began to think about how to understand these art forms that lie outside these “great” traditions or mainstream. Once I started to engage with these non-normative art forms, I was stunned by their richness in heterogeneity or “Otherness.” acknowledging their existence dissolves the boundaries between the self and the Other, as the totality of global culture is indisputable. The heterogeneity is difficult to find or less obvious within the traditional literati class, where social status and discourse are considerably fixed. The situation is different in the larger society beyond a certain elite social clique. Mobility happened not only via the voluntary movement of people but also via the exchange of trade, religion, culture, art, and thought. The history of movement and exchange between cultures and peoples are so openly reflected in crafts. The book is one of the best mediums for absorbing, carrying and disseminating a medley of content. For example, the Chinese Qur’an blends Chinese painting and Islamic styles. Artistic traditions and craftsmanship from India, Nepal, and other places can be found in many Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures; the formal hybridity they display is fascinating.

Most of these books are unattributed as they were collaboratively produced in workshops by craftsmen. Some were responsible for making paper, others polishing, some for copying scriptures, some for creating illustrations, and others for binding, etc. A book is the crystallization of collective wisdom and labor, an open-source code where everything converges and can then be dispersed to flow again. This ever enriching and open space of the book inspires rethinking about the dichotomy between the self and the Other, between different religions, cultures and ethnicities. It is where I see new possibilities for image-making can emerge. I extensively reference book forms from around the world, analyzing how their visual and textual information is compiled, organized, and presented, before translating them into my paintings. On top of that, I still need to integrate oil painting techniques and the expressiveness of modern and contemporary Western painting because these movements of making that once flowed through my body cannot be discarded, just as no memory can be manually erased.

For these paintings, which I treat as books and pages, I do not use the glaring white gesso primer on the canvases. Left in their original color, the canvases mimic the unbleached, beige hue of ancient handmade paper. I aim to highlight the gentle visual experience of the paper so that viewers can look at the painting as if reading a book. A book is also a carrier of text; on these endless pages, I can create various relationships between images and text, establishing a layered relationship among images from different cultural systems and languages.

This versatile, inclusive, and tolerant space of the book seems to be a feasible path toward alleviating the conflicts of cultural understandings. The blank spaces on the pages are not only the result of liubai (leaving white) of Chinese painting, but also imply a potential space for communication, change and integration. However, integration does not mean eliminating all differences; sometimes, we need to emphasize the differences. My work incorporates many architectural elements, which serve as my starting point for contemplating deeply the conflicts in perspective between different painting traditions. Perspectives vary significantly across the painting traditions of China, India, Islam, and Europe, among others: Western painting employs the one-point perspective, Chinese painting the isometric perspective, a term given by the West, while Indian and Persian miniature manuscripts adopt the omniscient God’s perspective, similar to the bird’s eye view. Since it is impossible to integrate these perspectives due to their fundamental differences, I decided to embrace their differences by presenting spatial and temporal conflicts in my paintings. The multiplicity of visual perceptions that appears in my paintings is an inevitable outcome of such experimentation.

Lai: I noticed that this triptych, Purity and Danger (2022), from the series The Glass Bead Game (2022) shows three different perspectives.

Han: Yes, exactly. This triptych, on one hand, presents a flat layout of urban and architectural structures like a map, but on the other hand, the flat structures cast shadows that offer a sense of three-dimensionality. The building façade on the far left rests above shadows, while the moon lurks behind the shadows. These works were created during the pandemic and they represent the enclosed spatial experience that we all suffered from during lockdowns. The illogical and unscientific configuration of space and perspective was intentionally conceived to generate a sense of absurdity and incomprehensibility. The middle panel is derived from a map-like, flattened architectural form in an Ottoman miniature painting of Mecca and Medina. By replacing the domed building with a modern pointed roof, I intended to evoke a more universal symbol and experience of contemporary household. The block-printed sections in the paintings were made using the woodblocks I collected during my research trip in India in early 2020, right before the pandemic. I selected a brick-like woodblock to construct the heavily textured and patterned architectural façade and space, while incorporating elements rendered in the style of Western painting, such as my most commonly used motif — the glass bead — which evokes the lushness of oil and refinement of detail in Flemish still life paintings.

It is in this way that I conceived an interplay of different perspectival schemes, various image-making methods and materiality, and the integration of craft on painting. The juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensionality maintains a tension of difference across the panels that are composed with the formal characteristics of the manuscript. My diptychs are more than painting panels — they are the left and right pages of a book. The assemblage of multiple panels is a more thorough deconstruction and reorganization of the book’s pages on this basis. Thus, these canvas pages echo the temporal and spatial extension of the narrative of the book, creating a dynamic of back-and-forth viewing between the left and right pages, reminiscent of a Chinese scroll painting.

Lai: In addition to the installation work Mirror Pavilion and the paintings in your solo exhibition ‘The Unending Rose’ at ShanghART Shanghai, you will also display a newly created video installations.

Han: Yes, although painting is my primary medium, I don’t see myself solely as a painter. I chose painting as my main means and focus of expression because it is particularly well-suited for comparing different cultural perceptions and visualities. This approach helps me contemplate the differences between civilizations and achieve multicultural coexistence on the canvas. It is not the first time that multimedia and video have appeared in my practice, but this video installation Panchatantra specifically deals with and challenges conventional ways of viewing moving image work. If books can adopt various forms, not just the conventional structure of a thread-bound book but also a wide array of unconventional shapes and sizes, large and small, all distinct — then why is the screen, which serves as a window to the mind, so monotonous in its form and ratio aspect?

Panchatantra seeks to disrupt this monotony and the paradigm of screen viewing. First, my goal was to create a sense of spiritual space devoid of gravity. Hence a white carpet in the space was installed to obscure the boundary between the wall and floor; five bookstands are scattered throughout the space, attempting to simulate the reading of ancient scriptures, with two sheets of rough Indian handmade Khadi paper placed on each stand. Projectors mounted on the ceiling project the moving images onto the handmade paper on the stands from above. Viewers are encouraged to sit on the carpet to “read” the moving image. The meaning of the images resides not only within the images themselves, but also in the way they are presented and in the physical experience of the viewer, which influences the interpretation and is part of the narrative. Moreover, the pixels of the video, when projected onto paper, transform into grains of fiber texture, blurring the line between video and book.

For me, the form of image presentation is very important. For instance, to display my small-scale paper works Scattered Pearls, I designed a paper diptych mount in the form of an open book suspended on the wall to accentuate the reference to the book. The presentation of an image has to do with cultural perceptions and customs. The white cube spaces of galleries and museum displays as products of colonization, erase the uniqueness of cultural contexts. Therefore, I want to restore cultural perceptions and epistemological memories by enriching forms of viewing, evoking bodily and spiritual sensations forced into oblivion by the violence of colonization. My future projects will also involve many mediums and formal experimentation on the basis of traditional presentation of images, though my concern is not so much with the novelty as with the cultural specificity of the medium and how to bridge the new medium with the ancient, rather than distinguishing them and denying the possibility of continuity.

Lai: How much does it matter that people see the ideas behind these works?

Han: This question is complex. My personal intentions are only an inducing factor in reaching an understanding. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the distance between people is actually quite vast. To a certain extent, there is not just a Tower of Babel between us, but each of us stands as an independent tower. Whether or not the ideas behind my works can be seen, or how important that is, is something I can hardly affirm, predict, or fully control.

But such difficulty and impossibility is beautiful in itself. This beauty is closely related to issues of translation that I’m deeply concerned with. The ethical foundation of my visual and writing practice is enlightened and informed by the Indian feminist literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s politics on translation. She reflects on the situation of the double bind experienced by Third World women, both beyond and within their nation states. In various double binds, the voices of subaltern women are forced to disappear. For this reason, she declares, “translation is impossible but necessary.” The impossibility of translation is first and foremost reflected in the fact that existence is a product of language, and a Third World subaltern woman would not exist in world constructed in Victorian English. Translation, then, is inherently and inevitably violent. How can such violence be mitigated? How can translation with ethical concerns be achieved? I was struck by Spivak’s suggestion that “The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying.” It is the difference that causes this fraying. In a world situation as complex as today’s, a good translation is no longer simply a matter of Xin Da Ya (faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, the crux of modern Chinese translation theory). The practice of translation must assume a political acuity and awareness. Not only should translation allow for difference, it shall also fall in love with difference, leading to love and bonding between the reader and author. It should be a dialogue between subject and subject, rather than the consumption of the translated Other as an object by the dominance of the translator-Subject. The difficulty and impossibility shouldered by the contemporary translator is precisely the fuel of this endeavor. Art and literature across the world have always been able to evolve, develop, hybridize, travel, and expand because the attempts to translate have never ceased due to difficulties and failure. In every translator’s mind, translation is impossible and our failure is destined, but it comes with a certain Sisyphean romance. I do not look for my identity in the clichéd image of the bohemian, white Western artist. Instead, I view myself as a translator, in tandem with all the great translators throughout history, such as Kumārajīva, who translated Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, as well as all the outstanding women translators around the world. Without these translation movements in history and in the present, there would be no world of peaceful coexistence; the history of peaceful coexistence is just as present as the history of conflict, but the former is often overlooked.

Back to your question, despite being fully aware of the challenges and impossibilities of translation and communication, I still pursue exchange and translation. Reaching an understanding takes a lot of effort, and I am committed to making that effort. I also hope that my translations can evoke and foster love for the Other and difference, and I wish for such love to bring about more change. Ultimately, translation is the politics of love.

Lai: Do you often get asked, why, as a Chinese person, you want to explore the cultures of other countries in your practice?

Han Mengyun: Whether at home or abroad, I have been frequently asked why I, as a Chinese person, would study Indian and Islamic culture. Questions like this always infuriate me. As a Chinese person, am I only supposed to study Chinese culture? The best response to this question is to question the question itself. But as this question has come up too often, I have begun to realize the importance of what it may imply. We need to understand how this monolithic perception of national identity is created and disseminated, and grasp the mechanisms behind it and the history of its formation. Deconstruction begins with deep understanding. It seems to me that this problem also offers the possibility of dissolving itself. If a Chinese person can only do Chinese things is already a normalized status quo, then the solution to it is to aggressively go against the grain and break the shackles that have been imposed on us more radically; like the branches that stretch beyond the ornamented frame and the birds that spiral inside and outside of it in Persian miniatures, we grapple with all the boundaries that confine us in every dimensions of our life’s journey. But the very first step is to identify that frame, to recognize what binds us.