Justin Rui Han: Shatter Zones

Tsuchigumo’s Playthings depicts autonomy through the eyes of the tsuchigumo, a monstrous spider from Japanese folklore. It owes its name to tuchigumori (土隠), which in an 8th-century chronicle referred to renegade tribes who lived in caves and evaded the imperial court. Here, the tsuchigumo sits in a corner near a silk-spinning station. The objects in the painting are projections of its sadistic play. The viewer enters the bathhouse it occupies from above, dangling vertiginously. An adjacent painting, Risk and Sanctuary, responds to Satsuo Yamamoto’s 1979 chronicle of silk production, Oh! The Nomugi Pass. Juxtaposing the silk workers’ lodgings is a snowy landscape and hulking vehicle alluding to a promotional trans-Himalayan expedition undertaken by the automotive manufacturer Citroën. Both canvases are littered with objects, rendered in the borrowed style of ukiyo-e (translated as “floating world”) woodblock prints, produced primarily in Japan between the 17th and 19th centuries. They become almost interchangeable, and there is something insidious about this slippage: an agricultural tool might be a toy; a toy might double as a shelter or a tool or a weapon.

In Stonecutter’s Revisions, a saw cleaves a block of patterned stone, making a terrible sound. Like many of Han’s paintings, it pulls imagery from anti-colonial and socialist cinema. Its architecture is drawn from Youssef Chahine’s social drama The Land (1970), as well as from various stone workshops Han observed in Southeast Asia, including one near the reconstructed temple of Borobudur.

Nearby, Peddlers’ Feud (A Breath of Wind Merits Release), which pays tribute to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s revenge drama Hyenas (1992), documents a failure of exchange, with two merchants leaving one another. Sometimes you have to hold onto what you have and walk away. Water flows through a field of opium; irrigation opens after being closed for days.

Occupational Hazards is an accident waiting to happen. Blades sit beneath a tarp, biding their time – a form of trap drawn from a premodern military manual. Looming overhead is a skeletal structure from Lino Brocka’s film Manila in the Claws of Light (1975). On the right, blue material is processed through a chute: the imperative of production exerts itself totally, like gravity.

In Han’s work, references collide and collude, frustrating attempts to account for their origins. It is impossible to take an adequate census of them. We might ask of any of them: How did this object enter this space? What are the systems that brought it here and imported it to this place? Han’s paintings emerge from curiosity and wonder in the face of an object’s alterity: the beautiful and terrible forces that congeal in the presence, here – in a street market, a museum, a digitised manuscript, a film still – of something from far away.

The art historian Joan Kee asks: “How can artworks that differ from, clash with, and even undermine one another coexist without capitulating to the logic of domination and subordination?” Han’s works don’t necessarily provide an answer to this query, but each one proposes a specific situation of convergence, alliance, and dissensus. For the artist, a painting can aspire to produce a feeling of historic opening, as the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung or the global revolts of 1968 did for Third World liberation. Though these events may not have produced the kinds of utopian global relationships that their participants proposed, his paintings are redolent of a dusty meeting hall, where things and nonhuman beings are substituted for people: a space for civic assembly or communion, where something yet might happen.

But it would be a mistake to say that these paintings “call back” to a golden age of solidarity or “prefigure” a pluralistic society to come. Han is drawn to objects for their indigestible complexity, their infinite internal variety. They are too particular – too peripheral – to consent to being enlisted for long. They make an appearance and keep going.

– Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant at MIT List Visual Arts Center