Texts

[Illustrated version available here.]

The Artist Room presents Shatter Zones, an exhibition of new paintings by Justin Rui Han (b. 1999, Rochester, New York).

The exhibition’s title, taken from anthropologist James C. Scott, refers to zones of refuge “where the human shards of state formation and rivalry accumulated willy nilly, creating regions of bewildering ethnic and linguistic complexity.” These ungoverned peripheries defy basic comprehension, disrupting processes of imperial consolidation and national self-definition. In the eyes of colonial mapmakers and would-be bearers of civilization, this territory appears perilously confused, ill- disciplined, and all too often impassable.

Han’s paintings are likewise composed of shards of ungovernable material. Each work in Shatter Zones is conceived as a kind of autonomous system, a densely functioning yet opaque assembly. The titles of the paintings suggest the beginnings of narrative, but closer looking reveals a patchwork ofspecificity: local areas of command, conflict, and exchange. The paintings are populated by figures whose business is unknown and whose motivations we can only guess.

Tsuchigumo’s Playthings depicts autonomy through the eyes of the tsuchigumo, a monstrous spider from Japanese folklore. Historically, the term also 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 space it occupies, nominally a bathhouse, is seen from a vertiginous perspective. The left side of an adjacent painting, Risk and Sanctuary, portrays a more conventional silk workshop, drawn from Satsuo Yamamoto’s 1979 labor epic, Oh! The Nomugi Pass. This interior is juxtaposed with a snowy landscape with a hulking vehicle, an allusion to a quixotic early 20th century expedition across the Himalayas. The canvas is littered with objects: rendered in the borrowed style of ukiyo-e prints, they become almost interchangeable. There is something insidious about this slippage: an agricultural tool might be a toy; a toy might be a house 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 anticolonial and socialist cinema. Its architecture is drawn from Youssef Chahine’s social drama The Land (1970), as well as from various stone workshops observed in Southeast Asia, including one near the reconstructed temple of Borobudur. Fishery and Semaphore at Day’s End is an ode to the sea divers of Jeju Island. Devices for naval communication, reconstructed from models in the Rijksmuseum, puncture this windblown landscape. A lighthouse – like one used by the Dutch to mark the contours of their empire in the Indies – casts more shadow than light, presiding over a restive archipelago.

Attendant and Desecrators depicts a terraced cemetery as an esoteric site of memory and mischief. The lone attendant, sagging on his perch, is helpless to prevent the advance of grinning vandals. This painting was prompted by Han’s visit to the terraced St. Michael’s Catholic Cemetery in Hong Kong, a city where traditional funerary practices have been adapted to a dense and ultramodern setting. (One proposal, for instance, imagined a floating columbarium moored to its shore.) The painting, however, does not belong to a single time or place: its wooden water wheel is drawn from a Chinese agricultural manuscript, and the offerings on its periphery were observed from burial grounds in Ridgewood, Queens. Nearby, Peddlers’ Feud, which pays tribute to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992), documents a failure of exchange. 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 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975). On the right, blue material is processed through a chute: the imperative of production exerts itself like sky, like gravity. In Han’s paintings, references collide and collude, provoking and frustrating a desire for accounting. 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, 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 digitized manuscript, a film still – of something from far away.

The art historian Joan Kee has asked, “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 do not attempt to answer 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 historical opening, analogous to the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung or the global revolts of 1968. 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.