Han feng: Forms in Becoming

​​

Matthew Liu Fine Arts is pleased to present Forms in Becoming, a solo exhibition by Han Feng. It brings together more than twenty works from his Somewhere series, made from 2012 to the present: paintings, fan-shaped canvases and fragments of old furniture wrapped in canvas. The series is titled after places yet depicts almost none of them. The titles name Shanghai, Suzhou, Berlin and London; the surfaces hold only washes of colour, areas of unpainted canvas and hidden contours. The exhibition asks a question that runs through more than a decade of Han’s work: when a name no longer corresponds to an image, what can the gap between them contain?

​

Han Feng’s painting began with ordinary architecture. For more than ten years in Shanghai he painted stairwells, corridors and ventilation outlets, erasing every human trace and leaving pale, ink-like greys. Somewhere Shanghai 2 (2012) already shows the shift: dense arcing strokes cover a canvas two and a half metres wide, crossed by a single diagonal of reserved white. The building has gone; only the direction and rhythm of the brush remain. After his move to Berlin in 2019, this withdrawal became a method. Having trained in Chinese painting, he says, he wants to make art more lightly, in a state of floating. Part of each decision is handed over—some to water, some to objects. Handing it to water means giving up full control. Han rarely intervenes in water’s accidents; he watches it seep and flow and adjusts his marks accordingly, “a dialogue between the will of the brush and the laws of water.” Where pigment comes to rest is often water’s decision. The dates of Somewhere 35 (2015–2026) span eleven years, the same canvas opened, set aside and opened again. Becoming does not mean unfinished; it is the time a painting allows itself to keep changing.

​

Paintings named after places form the core of the exhibition. In Somewhere Suzhou 26 (2024), two pale orange peaks float above a field of blue that faintly echoes their shapes, like hills seen across a garden pond, yet the image never settles into a recognizable landscape. The place name is not a caption. It works more like the inscription on a Chinese painting, indicating where looking begins without saying what is seen. Another group is built from rows of undulating marks. In Somewhere Berlin 30 (2026), each row is a chain of tiny peaks, the pigment running down between them like layered mountain ranges. These forms derive from bioelectric signals made up of the human voice, continuing the method of Han’s Schallwelle series, in which sound waves are divided into small units and transferred onto canvas section by section. What looks like a mountain range is in fact a voice once heard: an invisible rhythm, made visible as rise and fall.

​

The third group extends painting into space. Han replaces the traditional frame with found objects—chair backs, carved wooden elements—and wraps them in canvas, concealing their surfaces while keeping their volume and outline, “partly revealed, partly lost.” The titles come from what lies beneath: the blessings, auspicious motifs or stories carried by the objects themselves. In Somewhere Flowers and Birds 38 (2023), the flower-and-bird decoration remains under the canvas, unseen; only the title names it. The name becomes the one part of the image left exposed, telling what is hidden without showing it. A found-object frame, the artist suggests, creates an open stage: old things bring the use of earlier owners and the wear of time, and wrapping keeps that memory in another form.

​

From the stairwells of Shanghai to a studio in Berlin, from a trace of water and a recorded voice to an old object wrapped in canvas, Han Feng has kept doing the same thing: letting things stay on the canvas without saying everything about them. Each of these works happens somewhere—a place that can be named but not returned to. They remember where they came from, and allow themselves not yet to have taken shape. Standing before them, a viewer may recall a voice no longer clearly heard, or a room that survives only as an outline. What Forms in Becoming leaves behind is a memory still taking place.

​

Born in Harbin in 1972, Han Feng graduated from Harbin Normal University (1998) and earned a master’s degree from Shanghai University’s College of Fine Arts in 2009. He lives and works in Berlin and Shanghai. His awards include the Creative M50 Jury Prize (2008) and First Prize at the John Moores Painting Prize (China, 2010). His work has been presented at Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2023); KINDL, Berlin (2022); Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2015); Aichi Triennale (2013); Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (2012); Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2012); and the End of the World Biennial, Argentina (2011). His work is held in collections including the Saatchi Gallery, London; the University of Salford, Manchester; and the DSL Collection.