Night is such an anonymous being, it submerges us and defuses everything. Those who have been obscured leave a presence marked by absence, like a ghost that lingers and haunts. Night (2022), a multimedia installation by London-based artist Han Mengyun presented at IS A Gallery, is the result of opening up to the alterity: night, women, ethnic minorities and ancient craftsmanship, unravels a dialogue with the Other.  

Textiles rippling with black sheen hang like waves across the ceiling, under which a montage film is projected on the wall, the words narrated in the film come from four poems written by the artist. The text and the installation are juxtaposed in the gallery space, and their interplay constructs a resonating site of Night. Han Mengyun's practice is characterized by the combination of a variety of media: the hanging textiles are the traditional “bright cloth” made by the Dong people, a type of fabric commonly found in the costumes of the Dong and other ethnic minorities. The making of this fabric takes several procedures including dipping, pounding, drying, applying egg whites and so on. Dyed with indigo usually, the cloth is featured with its lustre. Due to the complexity of the manufacturing process, in the early days when textile technology had not yet developed, Dong women have had to work day and night for months to complete just one piece of "bright cloth". The making process conjures up in the artist’s mind an image of these women working collectively against the backdrop of the indigo-dyed textiles as if they were submerged by the tranquility of darkness. Their hidden identities are as ghostly beings dwelling in darkness, woven into every fibre. Stretching across the beams of the wooden ceiling, these textiles are like hovering dark clouds, the artist hereby renders the gloominess and ambiguity of the night. 

In 1956, the Shanghai Research Institute of Printing Technology was established and became the birthplace of type design in modern China. IS A Gallery is located at the former industrial and research site of this institute; the ancient art of printing has undergone many developments and transformation. The tracing of the Dong people's textile craftsmanship by the artist is a response to the original function of this architecture. However much the sweeping dominance of digital technology inevitably heralds the twilight of all traditional crafts, they have not vanished completely but taken a different form, haunting still.

If the installation made of the Dong cloth is the latent image of the labour of women as workers, the short film under this (wo)man-made darkness, then, poetically translates the identity and body of the mother as a life-giver, implying the artist's concern and surging emotional resonance to the violence and discipline imposed on female bodies in reality. The incident of the “chained mother of eight" in Fengxian County, Xuzhou, disclosing the darkness buried in the depth of society inspired the artist to compose a collection of poems that are narrated in the film. The film sequence itself seems to be made on the basis of poetry, as the images flow with the streams of language and the emotional undercurrents running within. 

Blue seedlings emerge from the nail shells

Out of the ocean, but to this strange place

Fresh milk flowing in the open stone 

Wet the butterfly wings hidden in the fruit

These verses come from the artist’s poem titled "Night I". Writings constitute an integral part of Han Mengyun's multifarious art practice that treats language as an artistic medium. Symbols and metaphors that abound in her writing also nourish the visual expression of other forms of her work. For example, the video Confession is a reflection of her practice of écriture féminine, a form of writing proposed by the French writer Hélène Cixous. Her painting practice is also heavily inspired by the formal conception of ancient manuscripts and Buddhist scriptures. 

In Han Mengyun's works, one can recognize the influence of Eastern philosophy and the aesthetics of classical Chinese painting. The installation of the Dong cloth is shaped like an unfolded ink scroll, reminiscent of the visual form of Xu Bing's installation A Book from the Sky, an artwork that also takes traditional Chinese aesthetics as its point of reference. As Gilles Deleuze proposes the concept of thought-images, Han Mengyun's videowork is an embodiment of her lyrical way of thinking, a discontinuity of difference. A series of paintings from her recent project The Glass Bead Game presented at Art Basel interweaves ethnological, religious, historical and contemporary cultural narratives. The triptych Purity and Danger (2022) reevaluates the system of classification between order and chaos through a reconfiguration of space and architectures rendered with the traditional Indian woodblock-printing method. This traditional craft has also been employed in her installation Logic of the Ether (2021): the textiles printed with various patterns and motifs by the artist are hung on the wooden structure, echoing the spatial construction of Indian temples and Dunhuang caves. The installation becomes a site of meditation enabling the imagination of the origin of the cosmos. The interplay between architecture and textile in this work is reiterated in Night.

We may understand Night as such a différance: non-linearity, multiplicity of media, diffracted practices, dissolving the dichotomy between subject and object, and disintegrating an established paradigm. Night itself is verily so: it is the différance of light, rather than its antithesis, wherein the presence of those who are forgotten, obscured and abject is exposed; all we need to do is to observe and to feel.