Roots and Ruins: Artist Han Bing on Nature, Memory, and Freedom

Born on Yuzhou Island and raised on a horse farm in Shandong, Han Bing spent over a decade teaching herself to paint before entering Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice has since taken her across the world, from construction sites in Delhi to the streets of Los Angeles, driven by a persistent concern for what modern civilisation costs us ecologically and spiritually. What emerges is an art that finds its language in ruins, rubble, and discarded things, all the places most would simply walk past and disregard. We spoke with her ahead of her appearance at Art Madrid.

Han Bing, Reproductive Tree, 2019, from the “Sexual Force of Nature” (2004 - present). Pigment ink printing on museum fine art paper. Image credit: Han Bing and Studio Monica Iglesias.

You were born on Yuzhou Island and later grew up on a horse farm in Shandong before studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. How have these early rural experiences shaped your understanding of the relationship between people, objects, and daily life in your work?

Yes, I grew up in a very primitive environment. There was no internet, no electricity, I was surrounded by trees, deer, horses, sea and lakes... For over 12 years, I worked in the fields while teaching myself to paint. Before entering the Central Academy of Fine Arts I didn't have an art teacher, nature and the land were my true art teachers. Especially due to the fact that China's ecology and traditional culture are being torn apart by extreme urbanisation, the influence of natural life and rural memories on my work has become increasingly stronger.

Your early practice explored the struggles and desires of ordinary people within what you call China’s ‘theatre of modernisation.’ What first drew you to this subject, and how has that inquiry evolved over time?

During my university years, I shifted from documentary figure painting to abstract painting. At that time, my works were the only abstract paintings in the Graduation Exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation, living in a metropolis, I witnessed the hardships faced by ordinary people during an era where big construction sites were seemingly taking over the urban landscape. I deeply empathised with the impact of China's rapid urbanisation on its traditional culture and the dreams of its people (which sometimes contradicted these developments). This influenced my video and performance art, although my creative language seemed to become more figurative and emotional when I was in the West.

Across painting, performance, photography, video, installation and social intervention, you often invert ordinary practices and reinvent everyday objects. What draws you to the act of reordering the familiar?

The essence behind my early works, whether visual or physical, was a series of psychologically driven behaviours responding to the crisis of faith and emotion brought on by social change in modern life. This outburst of 'love and civilisation' is reflected not only in my early paintings of urban ruins, but also across several series of social behavioural interventions. I feel that human beings' natural minds, bodies, and behaviours are bound by layers of constraints within so-called modern civilisation and the age of mechanical reproduction. The practice of 'normalising alienated behaviour' is, at its core, an exploration of how everyday human behaviour is formed within secular discipline.

Your work seems to transcend the boundaries between art and life, and address borders of race, gender, nation, class and religion. How do you approach translating such expansive concerns into tangible artistic form?

I believe that every individual is an artwork, ‘human existence’ is art, and the core of art is freedom. Based on this concept, the boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion are superfluous, narrow, isolating, cold-blooded, and even evil. I take an approach based around existence, growth, and then conception: whatever medium emerges is merely a natural reaction to that lived experience.

Some of your work intends to document the fracture between ecological and social culture. How does this tension between natural and modern civilisation manifest in your recent work?

Modern human desires are increasingly alienated from nature, even though the instincts of the human body and mind always originate from nature. Human limbs, our separations, and our connections are like the branches of trees – "A city where many individuals gather is a forest." Countless leaves and branches make up the entire tree, making it akin to a family tree of sorts. In other words, a forest where many tree souls gather is the equivalent of a family or a city and vice-versa.

Han Bing, Family Tree, 2000 (from the “Wear With”, 2004 - present). pigment ink printing on museum fine art paper. Image credit: Han Bing and Studio Monica Iglesias.

In your own words, you take something ‘meant to be ignored or quickly forgotten’ and transform it into something that makes you linger. How does this strategy operate in your studio practice?

The elements I focus on in my work are essentially the most mundane, even discarded, things like ruined walls, mud, stones, trash. In my 'Urban Amber' landscape series, for example, I combined images of water and air pollution to create a paradox between the beauty of the living landscape and the devastation behind it. Modern civilisation, with its seemingly endless desires, and the pollution and sediment of the industrial age, felt to me like something being frozen in amber: beautifully preserved and left for future archaeology and reflection.

After living in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Paris, you’ve drawn inspiration from urban textures, particularly the ‘errors’ and ‘glitches’ of ripped posters. What do these accidental surfaces allow you to express that traditional composition might not?

Growing up in a rural village and later living in many large cities, I think maybe it's this contrast between these cultures and landscapes that makes me particularly fascinated by ruins, walls, and the textures of the earth. I pay more attention to the details of modern ruins and everyday objects, which differ from the grand scenes of traditional Eastern landscape paintings. Moreover, I consciously reject the composition and artistic conceptions around traditional aesthetics – for example, I don't care about ‘blank space’ or ‘freehand brushwork.’ Some of my works are both ‘realistic’ (figurative) and ‘empty’ (abstract), such as my ‘Urban Amber’ series of landscapes, which look beautiful but originate from the heavily polluted rivers of our time.

Han Bing, Urban Amber (2005-2009). Pigment ink printing on museum fine art paper. Image credit: Han Bing and Studio Monica Iglesias.

You’ve described painting as a way to resist the overwhelming amount of information we are bombarded with in contemporary life. What does resistance look like for you within the act of painting itself?

Regardless of whether painting holds conceptual or practical value, the act of painting itself is a form of resistance, one could even say it is a kind of meditation, a counterpoint to our increasingly fragmented and intelligent contemporary lives. For many years I have combined painting with elements of action, and 'action as art' largely transcends the language of artistic self-expression.

Your works often begin with representational elements that gradually dissolve into abstraction through filtering and fragmentation. At what point do you decide a painting has reached its necessary level of deconstruction?

I call it the 'abstract of representation.' It begins with the so-called three-dimensional elements of reality, but the inner core of life and things is essentially empty, and the essence and root are ultimately abstract. However, this is not merely a formal or visual concern, nor does it rest at simply following the subconscious. It is something more spiritual. In the creative process, a primal artistic instinct is accessed through intuition, downloaded almost naturally. But in ultimate freedom, abstract and figurative languages become one and you can move into the mystical, or you can stop the brush anywhere, at any time.

Han Bing, Ruins, 2018. Mixed media on paper with linen. Image credit: Han Bing and Studio Monica Iglesias.

Finally, as an artist who has exhibited at institutions such as the National Art Museum of China, Le Consortium, and UCCA, how do you adapt your practice when working within different institutional or cultural contexts, particularly now in the setting of an international art fair like Art Madrid?

Working across different parts of the world requires me to create within very different contexts. At the Berlin Biennale, for instance, I combined installation with performance art. My solo exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art brought together video works and a live performance with university students and anti-war protesters. In Los Angeles, I embraced the tools of Mexican labourers. In Delhi, I meditated alongside construction workers, engaging with rubble and concrete. At the Manchester Triennale, I performed with a group of homeless people. Looking back to recent years, in France, I created large-scale abstract paintings, which are themselves a form of action painting.

ART MADRID art fair is open from the 4th to the 8th of March 2026 at the Crystal Gallery of Palacio Cibeles Madrid.