Han Bing’s “Atlas” at Thaddaeus Ropac London Maps the Space Between Worlds

At once elusive and precise, Han Bing’s paintings unfold in the instant between disappearance and emergence. In “Atlas,” her first U.K. exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac London, the artist transformed Ely House into a field of shifting perception—an expansive constellation of canvases and works on paper, accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that extends the exhibition’s meditations on time and materiality. Through each surface, time feels suspended, elastic, a medium as physical as paint itself.

Having lived between Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, Han Bing carries the residue of cities within her palette—their weathered façades, torn posters, and subterranean light. Trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and later at Parsons School of Design, she translates the contemporary metropolis into a syntax of abstraction where texture supplants image and rhythm overtakes depiction. Architecture, theatre, and the incidental poetry of the street converge into a visual language at once cerebral and sensorial.

Han Bing Paints the Act of Becoming

Rather than depict the visible world, Han Bing maps the act of becoming, working where perception slips—where metro corridors and urban skin dissolve into painterly strata. Layers of oil, oil stick, and aerosol overlap and erode, their friction revealing both control and surrender. The resulting compositions hover between restlessness and calm, their fragments holding together without resolving.

Even in her smaller works on newspaper, material carries its own pulse. Paint is pressed into newsprint in single, irreversible gestures—closer to monoprint than collage—so that time and pressure become structural forces. The printed surface is neither erased nor framed; it is rewritten, as though pigment were a form of recollection. Across “Atlas,” references migrate—mythic, anatomical, domestic—yet nothing calcifies into symbol. What endures is a conviction that painting can still register a state of mind before it hardens into image. For Whitewall, Han Bing reflects on what “Atlas” set in motion—how invisible shifts, an anatomical tilt or flicker of urban light, can alter perception; how painting resists acceleration to become, in her words, a “time expander.”

WHITEWALL: “Atlas” is your first exhibition in the U.K., spanning new paintings and works on paper. The title evokes mythology, anatomy, mapping, even pop culture. What does “Atlas” mean to you in the context of this presentation, and how do these references come together in your thinking?

HAN BING: I always liked the idea of introducing a show with a minimal term, but it’s usually something that bears quite some weight underneath it and can open to more interpretations—like a show I had in 2021 that was named “Company,” which means the condition of being with, but it’s also a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim that touched me deeply. In the process of studying my own body, I learned a slight twist of certain hard tissue or soft tissue can shift your entire body and your emotional state. How your teeth come in contact can shift the position of your atlas, which is the first vertebra of your spine that bears the weight of your entire head. Invisible or subtle nuances can have tremendous impact. Later I learned Atlas stands for a Titan who is condemned to hold up the heavens or sky for eternity, which rings true to its role in anatomy.

Capturing the Poetics of the City

WW: Your paintings often seem to exist in a pictureless interstice—a space between images that are disappearing and others that have not yet started to emerge. What draws you to this threshold, and how do you try to capture that delicate moment of becoming?

HB: I often think of the word clash when I look at the paintings, yet the paintings are not the result of a violent act—it’s more like air streams holding force against each other that somehow became still. They are seemingly frozen, but they are still in motion. It’s also a state of not the way they were once and not the way they soon will be.

WW: You’ve often described being drawn to torn posters, metro corridors, and the palimpsests of city walls—things usually meant to be ignored or quickly forgotten. How do these urban fragments infiltrate your work, and what changes once you begin layering and reworking them in the studio?

HB: I see the source materials more like landscapes, where all the cultural and urban references are merely organic forms for me to draw from. To me, any of the geometric shapes or a glimpse of a very specific reference—either it’s a Nike advertisement or a detail of an early-1900s painting—is the same as a shade under a tree. Usually these are the starting points of the painting, and as it sails off they would gradually detach from the source material and grow into their own being. The cracks are where the light comes in; it’s also where you bond everything together as one system.

Balancing Chaos and Harmony

WW: You’ve spoken of your process as a kind of continual transformation, like shedding a skin, where the old has not yet vanished and the new has not fully formed. Do you think of painting as a way of embodying time, of showing transformation in visual form?

HB: Yes, lots of contemporary tools we have now are like time compressors, but painting and the process of painting to me are more like time expanders. For me, it offers a bit of resistance to the pace or measurements that were given by contemporary tools and devices—and how they frame our lives. Painting, in a way, is to draw a frame or screen out of a screen that our eyes are accustomed to; it’s the flash between two moments or frames. It’s a bit of a refusal and reluctance, a bit of a pause.

“The cracks are where the light comes in,”

Han Bing

WW: Your surfaces combine geometric forms, sweeping brushstrokes, splatters, and even what resemble rips or glitches, yet the paintings often radiate a great calm. How do you approach this balance between disruption and harmony, chaos and compositional peace?

HB: I recognize arbitrary juxtapositions of different forces that come together from different directions, that didn’t necessarily come from the same source but somehow through painting can coexist and complement each other with their own textures. Maybe the “compositional peace” was already there from the beginning—it happened at the recognition.

WW: Sometimes traces in your works suggest coastlines, tables, or windows, though you’ve said [in the exhibition catalogue], “It’s okay with me if you see a coastline there. But while I was painting, I didn’t think of that.” How do you hope viewers navigate these moments of recognition and illusion within your paintings?

HB: I always welcome different readings and interpretations, but I don’t like to tell people what to look at. I like inserting domestic elements that offer familiarity in the painting, but when you look closely there’s always some sort of deformation or uncanny quality to them. It’s more of an inflection, an in-between state from one to the next.