Han Ren

Lives and works in Paris, France

Artist statement

My work begins with the instability of images. Images persist, shift, and reappear as they move across different materials, spaces, and contexts. Each encounter reshapes their appearance and their meaning. Through cutting, carving, sawing, and scraping, I work directly into material, allowing images to emerge from traces rather than being applied onto a surface. These actions do not reveal a pre-existing image. Instead, the image comes into being through the transformation of the material itself. The image is neither imposed upon the material nor independent of it. Material and image take shape together through the same process. Beginning with drawing, my practice expands into material transformation and site-specific installation. As images migrate from paper into architecture and space, they acquire new spatial and temporal conditions. They are encountered through movement as much as through vision. Looking becomes a bodily experience that continually reorganises the relationships between image, material, architecture, and viewer. I draw on natural phenomena, mythology, historical imagery, and fragments circulating through contemporary media. Detached from their original contexts, these forms are reconfigured through material processes, where recognition is never entirely stable. They form structures that carry the posture of monuments without becoming fixed monuments themselves, holding a tension between commemoration and dissolution.

Artwork