Lan Han grew up in Sichuan Province, China, and his work reflects the emotional shifts and lingering memories that accompanied his later move to the city. Now based in Chongqing, he creates quiet, meditative paintings that gently layer personal memory with collective feeling.

Working with traditional materials such as silk and ink, Lan Han’s landscapes do not depict specific realities—they are closer to afterimages of remembrance. Mist-covered ponds, blurred trees, and snow-covered sanctuaries emerge not as clear forms, but as emotional terrains—soft, fluid, and unresolved.

In his paintings, figures and landscapes never fully solidify. Like unfinished sentences, they hover in a state of quiet suspension. This indistinctness is not a lack of clarity, but a visual expression of emotional distance—between city and nature, center and periphery, present and past.

Using the natural absorbency of silk, the artist allows ink to gently bleed across the surface, creating scenes where feeling seems to slowly seep in. There is no fixed center, no conclusion—only the rhythm of memory and emotion, unfolding softly across the image.

Within the context of this Biennale’s theme, Neighbors of Civilization, Lan Han explores “neighborness” as a flow of feeling, a subtle connective tissue between people, histories, and places. In his work, the “sea” is not a geographic barrier, but a quiet passage through which empathy and memory travel.

Before these lyrical and subdued images, viewers may find themselves facing their own forgotten feelings—traces of past experiences rising again, gently.

Through the materiality of ink and the softness of silk, Lan Han offers an East Asian sensibility of emotion—delivered not with force, but with calm, quiet grace.