Qin HAN: All about love - From France to Spain to China: Curated by Rabbi WANG

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present Qin HAN's solo project All about love - From France to Spain to China, on view from September 25 through October 24, 2026. Curated by Rabbi Wang, the exhibition brings together more than thirty works drawn primarily from her Love Series and the Paradise Series, tracing the evolution of Han’s practice through encounters with nature, embodied perception, language, and culture. Born in Dalian, Liaoning Province, in 1987, Han has been living and working in Paris. Moving between acrylic, mineral pigments, paper-cutting, collage, and performance, she layers materials and constructs spatial relationships to create a visual language situated between painting and installation. With love as its guiding thread, the exhibition follows the development of her work across projects in France and Spain and brings it back to China in its most comprehensive presentation to date. The title echoes American writer bell hooks’s book All About Love, which understands love as an active practice grounded in care, commitment, responsibility, respect, and trust. Here, love expands beyond private emotion to become a way of relating across human life, nature, culture, and other forms of existence.

Han’s understanding of nature and the world has been shaped by a series of experiences that transformed the way she perceives reality. In 2013, she participated in a workshop in Paris centered on shamanic culture, during which ritual elicited bodily responses that could not be fully explained through reason or language. The experience opened a passage toward modes of perception beyond the rational, allowing dreams, meditation, and intuition to become distinct ways of encountering the world. In 2020, sudden restrictions left her unexpectedly stranded on Corsica, in the western Mediterranean, where she spent eight months living alone in the forest. With few material resources, daily life was reduced to its most elemental rhythms: chopping wood, making fire, walking, and observing. Prolonged solitude gradually brought into view the often-overlooked bonds between human beings, plants, animals, and their surroundings. Created in the period that followed, Lost in the Jungle serves as the starting point of the exhibition. Pink bodies are dispersed among dark branches, appearing at once to move through the forest and to grow from within it. The work emerged from Han’s solitary walks, during which unfamiliar sounds would often cause her to stop and listen, as though spirits hidden among the trees were speaking to her. In this state of unencumbered wandering, nature emerges as a living field of mutual perception and energetic exchange.

The Love Series began in the wake of the Russia–Ukraine war in 2022. Confronted with the profound imbalance produced by violence, Han began to ask whether art could generate a force moving in the opposite direction to destruction. Language and culture are never neutral; they carry collective memory, historical experience, and political boundaries. From within these structures, Han extracted one of the simplest and most universal words: LOVE. She first wrote the word in Ukrainian, followed by Russian, before expanding the project to more than fifty languages. In each work, she writes simultaneously with both hands, moving slowly outward from the center of the paper. When one hand reaches the edge, the other must stop. Unable to move in perfect synchrony, the two hands evoke subjects in conflict, compelled to negotiate a shared rhythm through repetition, delay, and mutual restraint. As the word is written again and again, its semantic meaning, cultural affiliation, and political charge gradually recede, leaving behind the movement of the body, the accumulation of time, and textures that resemble breath. Beginning with Ukrainian and Russian, the act of writing ultimately crosses the boundaries drawn by conflict and gives love and peace a quiet yet resolute voice. The paper functions both as a painting and as the residue of a durational performance. Drips, bleeding ink, and overlapping marks formed through the use of a dip pen allow chance to enter the work’s underlying order, preserving emotion in the process of its emergence. In Han’s work, love precedes nationality, institutions, and identity; it is a primal, expansive, and nearly boundless impulse of life.

Han’s artistic language has taken shape through a sustained process of unlearning. By loosening the pictorial order instilled through academic training, she moves closer to the primary modes of perception preserved in childhood and dreams, returning art-making to a state whose boundaries have yet to be fixed by knowledge. Her early performance work and long-standing interest in Chinese shadow puppetry led her to approach painting as a live site composed through the body, movement, time, and space. As her practice developed, the physical and temporal qualities of performance and the spatial logic of installation gradually entered her paintings, eventually coalescing in the Paradise Series. Paper-cut forms, Xuan paper, acrylic, and mineral pigments are layered inside box-like structures, where occlusion, suspension, and parallax create compressed theatrical spaces capable of holding multiple overlapping scenes. Figures, clouds, hair, plants, and limbs drift through these spaces like fragments of a dream, continually joining, separating, and transforming.

Language and cultural customs provide another point of entry into these imagined worlds. When Han first arrived in France, she often responded to the literal images summoned by idioms before grasping their conventional meanings. This productive misreading gradually became a method for constructing images. Paradise of Rainbows transforms the Chinese expression “rainbow fart”—a slang term for extravagant praise—into streams of rainbow light bursting from the body, romantically surrounded by bubbles, snails, and floating figures. In Paradise of Laughter, the French expression “raining like a cow pissing” is brought together with tears, smiling masks, and the cow evoked by La vache!, an exclamation of surprise, allowing sorrow and delight to share the same stage. Idioms thus become latent image structures embedded within everyday language, waiting to be activated. From writing simultaneously with both hands to drawing, cutting, layering, and mounting paper, repetition, slowness, and concentration form the inner rhythm of Han’s practice and lend it the character of a humble, meditative ritual. All About Love ultimately points toward the countless ways in which living beings are connected: as the boundaries imposed by language, identity, and nation begin to loosen, love reveals itself as a primal and authentic life force through which a shared future may once again be imagined.