ART CITIES: London-Han Bing

Han Bing is recognised for her sensitive yet disruptive visual language in paintings that deconstruct pictorial reality and open up new dimensions. Having recently moved to Paris after living in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai, her practice draws on urban elements, including street scenes and architectural facades. She takes inspiration from the textures and patterns that appear in cities – especially the ‘errors’ and ‘glitches’ generated by ripped posters.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

“Atlas” marks the debut presentation of Han Bing’s work in the United Kingdom, unveiling at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Known for her paintings that are at once sensitive and disruptive, Han Bing captures the fractured textures of urban life with a rare precision. Occupying the gallery’s ground floor, the exhibition brings together a group of new canvases alongside a series of works on paper, executed on found pages of newspaper—an idiosyncratic hallmark of the artist’s practice. As its title suggests, “Atlas is a meditation on mapping: the city emerges as both subject and surface, a livi”ng topography where images collide, dissolve, and reform in unexpected ways. Born in China and now based in Paris, Han Bing has lived in New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, each city leaving its sediment in her visual language. Rather than working from direct representation, her paintings evolve from impressions absorbed almost unconsciously during her daily passage through streets and subways. She is particularly attuned to the layered remnants of posters and advertisements, their torn edges forming accidental compositions that recall geological strata. These palimpsests infiltrate her imagination and resurface on the canvas as chromatic fragments and jagged planes, scraped back and reworked over many months. Han Bing begins each painting with what she calls the “skeleton”—a compositional structure loosely held in her mind—before layering colors, or “tissue,” across its surface. The result is never static. She frequently disrupts recognisable imagery with painterly ruptures—marks that echo rips, glitches, or interruptions in memory. In “they told me it only gets better” (2025), a serene domestic table scene reminiscent of an interiors magazine spread is violently fractured by a faceted form, a sculptural “punch” that destabilises the picture plane and resists resolution. Titles play a crucial role in the artist’s practice, offering poetic fragments rather than explanations. Han Bing draws from overheard conversations, film dialogues, lyrics, and her own passing thoughts—traces of lived experience that resist fixed interpretation. The exhibition’s title, “Atlas”, is itself multiply inflected: it invokes the mythological Titan forced to carry the heavens, the cervical vertebra that supports the human head, and a cartographic tool for navigation. Han Bing further layers these associations with references as varied as “The Wizard of Oz” and the music of the late rapper Mac Miller, weaving a constellation of cultural fragments that reflect the oscillation between dislocation and return, between the search for belonging and the recognition of home. Alongside her monumental canvases, the exhibition presents a series of intimate works on newspaper. These are made by pressing paint directly onto newsprint, in a process akin to monoprinting. The outcome, the artist notes, is always a revelation: “You never know what’s going to come out until you peel the paper off and it reveals itself to you.” These small yet potent works echo the accidental mark-making of urban surfaces—graffiti, weathering, layered posters—while destabilising the authority of the printed word. Splashes of pigment obscure images and headlines, creating what feels like light leaks across the page. Ephemeral yet incisive, they remind us that in the contemporary city, no image is ever final; every surface is provisional, susceptible to transformation, and charged with the possibility of new meaning. “Atlas” thus presents not only a body of paintings but also a cartography of perception itself. Han Bing charts the ways in which the city inscribes itself on the imagination—through its ruptures, its residues, and its chance encounters—mapping spaces that are at once geographical, anatomical, and emotional.

Photo: Han Bing, Vivor, 2025. Acrylic and oil pastel on paper, 24.5 x 18.6 cm (9.65 x 7.32 in), © Han Bing, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 2/9-4/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/