综合媒介装置：
夜经 (Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र)
三频4K数字影像, 彩色及黑白, 立体声, 46分13秒 © 韩梦云
夜藏 (The Womb, निशागर्भ)
铝合金雕塑, 侗布, 艺术家定制不锈钢长凳, 尺寸可变 © 韩梦云
夜之幽暗，在产后抑郁的时光中曾催生出她的诗篇，也为她带来了真正的解放——韩梦云，这位日光下的绘画者，开启了她以诗歌写作和转喻手法动态影像为标志的夜之实践，以“黑暗”作为隐喻式的出发点，反思女性的苦难及解放的可能。
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 2024年釜山双年展展览现场 © 韩梦云
《夜经》(Night Sutra, [शर्वरीसूत्र, Śarvarīsūtra]) 是韩梦云第一部以长片形式呈现的三频影像作品，在侗布装置的围绕下，作品的形态喻指着一个静待审视的子宫。梵文शर्वरी (śarvarī)同时具有“夜晚”和“女人”的双重含义，而《夜经》正是在这种双关语义的基础上发展而来，通过女性的劳动、普世的苦痛、共同的跨文化传承、宗教及文学中对于女性的再现，作品对于区域交叉性进行着探究。这部作品的拍摄跨越四个国度，从中国贵州的大利侗寨到柬埔寨的金边和暹粒，从英国伦敦到瑞士韦威，不同背景的女性在多种语言呈现的共同言说之中相互联结在一起，即有远古昨日，亦有当下今昔。就像是“sūtra (सूत्र)”一样——在梵文中，这个词语意味着将教义串联集合在一起——这部影像作品模仿着佛教手抄本的木版印刷形式，将大量内容缝合承载在一起。将流亡、离散、重建与反叛的故事串联成一体的纬线，是艺术家韩梦云进行拉康式精神分析进程的录制片段，借此，她思索着一代又一代的女性与母性经验、产后抑郁、标志着女性存在的身体性痛苦，以及佛教文化中鲜少涉及的厌女问题和她自身之间的关系，还有她对于前者的批判。故而，“经 (sūtra)”也是夜之创伤的缝合线 (suture)。
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 2024年釜山双年展展览现场 © 韩梦云
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 影像截帧 © 韩梦云
从佛教经文的动画演示、红色高棉大屠杀幸存者口述史实的转喻式再现，到柬埔寨古典舞蹈以及艺术家的表演纪实，通过在包罗万象的多样叙事形式之间交替变化，这部影像作品旨在体现中国佛教文化中“变文”——一种由佛教教义的白话演绎发源而来的文学体裁——的散文说唱文体、口述性、表演性及形象化效果。对韩梦云来说，她与各种艺术及知识传统、直至宗教之间那种亲密而深刻的关联并不是对昔日传统的简单遵从或崇拜，而是借由埃莱娜·西苏式的“阴性书写 (écriture féminine)”来进行的一种女性主义批判，以言说着的女性身体所具有的文化地域性和个体特异性作为辅助。
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 影像截帧 © 韩梦云
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 2024年釜山双年展展览现场 © 韩梦云
这部作品借用拉康的分析路径和术语，转而对精神分析中的菲勒斯主义进行批判，后者无是在隐喻层面还是生物层面都对“女性 (feminine)”施加了错误的定义，将其认定为一种“有所缺失的形式”，它以一种二元主义完备性的错误理念否认了女性作为一个实体的自主性。韩梦云将她的精神分析进程展现在公众面前，是因为她的女性特质使她发现了她的原乐(jouissance)，而前者曾长久地被强制性的隐私所埋藏，对她来说，这一点致使了弗洛伊德针对女性性生活的贬义评价，称其为神秘莫测的“黑暗大陆”。
《夜经》(Night Sutra, शर्वरीसूत्र) 2024年釜山双年展展览现场 © 韩梦云
为矫正这种谬误，韩梦云通过纺织材料装置作品《夜藏》(The Womb, [निशागर्भ, niśāgarbha])对“黑暗 - 女性”的语义联结提出了另一种阐释；借由中国侗族妇女制作的光泽熠熠的传统布料，韩梦云在作品中为“黑暗”的概念赋予了全新语境，侗族女性对黑色心怀崇敬，因为这是子宫之暗的颜色。附着在布料上的蛋清进一步指向了生育的意涵，为织物添上一层独特的金属光泽。两个半圆铝合金支架组成了这件作品的结构，其形态由取材自大利侗寨的树枝翻模而成，这一结构保留了当地纺织工坊悬挂布匹的传统，彰显出侗族文化所特有的符号象征。这件装置将子宫与夜的剧场糅合在一起，为其中的动态影像营造空间，使观众迷醉在一种独特的夜间模式中，反思着黑暗的多重维度：被遮蔽的女性劳动，被误译为歇斯底里的苦痛，与女性自我形象认同有关的“黑暗”所具有的解放潜能——这样的女性形象，并非作为菲勒斯的缺失——而是作为一个怀抱着生命与智慧、诗歌与美的滋养空间。
《夜藏》(The Womb, निशागर्भ) 2024年釜山双年展展览现场 © 韩梦云
Han Mengyun, Night Sutra, 2024 © Han Mengyun
3-channel 4K digital video, color and B&W, stereo sound 46 minutes 13 seconds
Emancipated by the darkness of the night which gave rise to her poetry during fits of her postpartum depression, Han Mengyun, a painter by day, began her nocturnal practice marked by poetic writing and metonymic moving image, which metaphorically takes darkness as its point of departure to reflect on women’s suffering and the possibility of liberation.
film stills, Night Sutra, 2024 © Han Mengyun
Night Sutra (शर्वरीसूत्र, Śarvarīsūtra) is the artist’s first feature length 3-channel video embedded in a Dong textile installation alluding to the form of a womb open for scrutiny. The Sanskrit word śarvarī (शर्वरी) means both the night and women. Thus Night Sutra (Śarvarīsūtra) develops upon this double entendre, investigating intersectionality through women’s labor, universal suffering, shared transcultural heritage, religious and literary representation of women.The work was shot in 4 countries, from Dali Dong village in Guizhou China, to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia, from London, UK to Vevey, Switzerland, where women of different backgrounds are connected by the common act of utterance unfolding in a multitude of languages, both ancient and contemporary. Much like a sūtra (सूत्र), which in Sanskrit literally means a collection of teachings strung together, the moving image mimics the block-printed format of the Buddhist manuscripts while sewing and holding multitudes together. The weft that ties stories of exile, diaspora, restoration and rebellion are recorded episodes of the artist Han Mengyun's Lacanian psychoanalytic sessions, through which she ruminates on generational womanhood and motherhood, postpartum depression, the bodily suffering that marks women's existence, as well as her relationship to and critique on the seldom discussed misogyny in Buddhism. The sutra is thus a suture of nightly wounds.
Installation view: Night Sutra, Busan Biennale 2024 © Han Mengyun
The Womb, 2024, aluminium sculptures, Dong fabric,
artist-designed Dong inspired stainless steel benches, Dimensions Variable © Han Mengyun
Alternating between various narrative forms, encompassing the animated display of Buddhist verses, metonymic presentation of oral accounts of Khmer Rouge survivors, to the Cambodian classical dance and the artist’s documented performances, the film aims to embody the prosimetric structure, orality, performativity and pictorial affect of the Buddhist Chinese Bianwen (變文, lit. transformation texts), a literary genre originated in the vernacular performance of Buddhist teachings. Han Mengyun regards her intimate and deep engagement with various artistic and intellectual traditions as well as religions not as a naive compliance to and worship of the past but as a feminist critique through enacting a Cixousian écriture féminine, supplemented by cultural locality and individual specificity of the speaking female bodies.Borrowing Lacanian analytic approach and terminology, the work in return critiques the phallocracy of psychoanalysis that wrongly defines the feminine, be it metaphorical or biological, as a form of lack, which denies the autonomy of the feminine as an independent entity complete in herself. The exposure of her psychoanalytic sessions to the public is propelled by the discovery of her jouissance in the uncovering of her femininity long hidden in mandated privacy, which is to her what led to Freud’s derogatory remark of women’s sexual life as a mysterious and unfathomable “dark continent”. Han Mengyun proposes an alternative interpretation of this darkness-women association as a corrective endeavour through her textile installation “The Womb” (निशागर्भ, niśāgarbha) , which recontextualizes the notion of darkness through the use of the lustrous traditional cloth made by Chinese Kam/Dong minority (侗族) women who worship the color black for its reference to the darkness of the womb. The egg white applied over the cloth further insinuates the idea of fertility, adding a metallic luminosity unique to the fabric. Consisting of two half circles made of cast aluminium tree branches sourced in Dali Dong village, the structure preserves the hanging tradition of the local textile workshop while acknowledging the symbolism peculiar to the Dong. The installation concocts both a womb and a nocturnal theater for the moving image within, bewitching the audience into a peculiar night mode to reflect on the multiple dimensions of darkness: the veiled labor of women, the suffering mistranslated as hysteria, the emancipatory potential of darkness in relation to the identification of the feminine to her own image—not as a lack of phallus—but as a nourishing space that harbors life and wisdom, poetry and beauty.
韩梦云：无尽的玫瑰
Han Mengyun: The Unending Rose
香格纳上海 ShanghART Shanghai
2023.11.05~2024.01.07
访谈 |《艺术世界 ArtReview》, 2023年冬季刊
韩梦云：翻译最终是爱的政治
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关于艺术家
韩梦云（1989年生于武汉）是一位目前常驻于伦敦的视觉艺术家、比较文化学者、多语写作者以及一位母亲。
韩梦云于巴德学院(Bard College)获得艺术学士学位，并于京都大学(Kyoto University)等多所机构从事梵文研究，后于牛津大学取得艺术硕士学位(MFA)，主要研究方向为古典印度学和印度美学理论。近期个展包括“无尽的玫瑰”（香格纳上海，2023）；“夜”（ISA画廊，上海，中国，2022）；“玻璃珠游戏”（香格纳画廊，巴塞尔艺术博览会，巴塞尔，瑞士，2022）；“玉屑集”（千高原艺术空间，成都，中国，2019）；“无定”（今日美术馆，北京，中国，2013）等。近期群展包括“在黑暗中看见”釜山双年展（釜山当代艺术博物馆，韩国，2024）；“跨界：可能与回响”（余德耀美术馆，上海，中国，2023）；“不安的绘画”（UCCA Edge，上海，中国，2023）；“乌利·希克收藏展”（松隐艺术空间，首尔，韩国，2023）；“贮藏”（麦勒画廊，北京，中国，2022）；“未有名目的言说”（上海当代艺术博物馆，上海，中国，2021）；“沙特阿拉伯迪里耶双年展”（《三镜亭》）（沙特阿拉伯，2021）等。
作为多语言写作者的韩梦云也实验着跨文化、跨历史和跨媒介的视角，其文章曾发表于ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic、 American Suburb X、《艺术界Leap》、《信睿周报》、《Luncheon Magazine》, 以及纽约新当代艺术博物馆（New Museum）三年展图册《Soft Water Hard Stone: 2021 New Museum Triennial 》和艺术家的图册中。
Han Mengyun (b. 1989, Wuhan) is a visual artist, comparatist, multilingual writer and a mother. She is currently based in London.
Han Mengyun received BA in Studio Art from Bard College and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories.
Han Mengyun received BA in Studio Art from Bard College and has pursued the study of Sanskrit at various institutions such as Kyoto University before she completed her MFA at the University of Oxford with a research focus on Classical Indology and Indian aesthetic theories. Her recent exhibitions include "The Unending Rose" (ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2023); "Night" (ISA Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2022); "The Glass Bead Game" (ShanghART Gallery booth, Art Basel, Switzerland, 2022); "Splinters of Jade" (A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, China, 2019); "In Between Island" (Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2013). Recent group exhibitions include "Seeing in the Dark" Busan Biennale 2024 (Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Korea, 2024); "Bordercrossing：Possibilities and Interactions" (YUZ Museum, Shanghai, China, 2023); "Painting Unsettled" (UCCA Edge, Shanghai, China, 2023); "Chinese Contemporary Art from the Uli Sigg Collection" (SONGEUN, Seoul, Korea, 2023); "A Place for Concealment" (Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing, China, 2022); "The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me" (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2021); and the Diriyah Biennale (Saudi Arabia, 2021) etc.
As a writer, Han Mengyun has also written extensively from a transcultural and transhistorical perspective. Her writing can be found on Hyperallergic, American Suburb X, Leap, The Thinker, Luncheon Magazine and elsewhere. She has also contributed to exhibition catalogues, such as Soft Water Hard Stone: 2021 New Museum Triennial (Phaidon) and artist monographs.
