Han Bing: territory to be tamed ------- if not later then when

In this new group of eleven paintings, Han Bing mines the constant but mostly
unobserved skirmish between our precisely gridded metropole and its unruly
constituents. The works on view are inspired by photographs, many captured in
subterranean stations across Manhattan, which the artist has crystallized into
delicate abstractions that evidence a tenuous balance. Crucially, while capturing
the dilapidated state of her adopted city’s transit system, these paintings also
serve as framing devices by which to present compositions hiding from the
commuter in plain sight.
The paintings call to my mind the pastime of bored riders waiting for a delayed
train: peeling the surface of ads pasted to terminal walls to reveal fragments of
previously pasted ads below them. Han Bing’s process is an inversion of this
insubordinate act. Rather than peeling away, she instead built several of the
paintings up from heavily saturated grounds of hunter green. This hue, now visible
only peripherally, is the color dictated by New York City zoning laws for the
construction of the ubiquitous and highly contentious scafolding termed “sheds.”
It’s a color with which most city residents are familiar to the point of having
become inured to its presence, but Han Bing homes in on this visual detail of the
urban landscape and employs it strategically and emphatically, her green grounds
structuring the works at their upper and lower edges. The artist afxed multiple
layers of acrylic that had been carefully spray-painted so as to mimic the
granular texture of commercial photographs. And there is another inversion at
play. The artist selects her happenstance compositions for their inefable
“rightness,” but the resulting paintings are anything but casual. Han Bing’s is both a
humble undertaking and a monumental one. As any painter (or, for that matter,
comedian or ballet dancer) can attest, nailing the efect of efortlessness is no
small task.
One striking example is Champs-Élysées, 2018, which features a forest-green
acrylic wash on canvas whose gridded framework is created from negative space
—lines taped of while the fabric was saturated so that the unprimed support
peeks through. Champs-Élysées was inspired by a photograph of half-scraped
ads—this time, as the title indicates, observed from the Parisian street. The
resulting piece recalls Lynda Benglis’s poured latex floor experiments. Han Bing
disrupts the grid with deceptively complex organic forms at the work’s upper and
lower edges, created by pouring pale blue paint onto the horizontal canvases so
that it formed tendrils and eddies. The pattern is thus disrupted by a combination of chance and control. In its reference and in its process, Champs-Élysées
evokes the interplay of intentional destruction and random interventions by
which the work’s source image came to be. As in all of these works, the friction
between the two is clear.
While these paintings present photographs distilled to abstraction, a key to
understanding them can be found in a separate but directly correlated suite of
works on paper. These pieces, sheets of New York Times newsprint originally
used as paint blotters, were chosen just as the subway compositions were, for
their satisfying formal relation between surface and ground. It’s difcult not to
project the titles of these articles onto the works themselves. (One reads “Who’ll
Pay for the Mess at Equifax?” recalling last year’s panic-inducing nationwide
security breach.) And yet that is what the artist asks us to do: To see them not for
their headlines but as visual objects. Far from paeans to modernist notions of
“pure abstraction,” these pieces cumulatively suggest simply that we take a
moment to appreciate the elegance of this wild, messy, visual world before
plunging back into the fray.
— Cat Kron