Flame of the Universe: Prologue

Flame of the Universe: Prologue—Jin Han

“For a time, on that day with the absence of yesterday, a unreasonable big bang gave birth to everything, thus creating both you and me and providing us with the future. Curiosity about the unknown world is the DNA of each and every organism. Human beings, who view everything from the perspective of “Future”, always look for the uncharted source and the guidance on life in different ways. Exploration is based on paying a price. The more one knows, the more helpless and perplexed he feels. Fortunately, art and science always walk hand in hand in the long river of civilization. They help each other, providing the shelter and dignity for human beings, a solitary race.”  

— Jin Han

The observation of the sky is one of the major hallmarks of human civilization. The calendar serves as the commencement of the observation of the sky as science. With alien stars as the calendar and the flame as the sequence, an artist, Jin Han, has triggered a flamboyant storm of the universe, thus becoming a new way for him to create the description of civilization. 

This time, more than ten works are exhibited, including the series such as “nebulae”, “star chart”, “insight” and “stars and calendar”. The exhibition, from the endless horizon to the connotation of noumenon, reflects the artist’s meditation on the lamination of different dimensions. In “start chart”, both its layered internal structure and intertwined topological lines display the artist’s solid painting attainment. Works such as "Flow and Time" and "Spin and Time" give express to the artist’s ample consideration of time and space as a horizontal dimension and a longitudinal dimension, respectively. In his works, “time” serves as the medium for discussing other media, phenomena and philosophical ideas from beginning to end. And in the manner of diptych, the works in the series of “insight”, all the more juxtapose and discuss the categories such as macro-level & micro-level, reality & consciousness and moment and flow, hence being pregnant with the elasticity of thinking.

The works of Jin Han are characterized by the grandeur in keynote. In his painting, the coarse painting vestiges look like Pompeii Murals, connecting civilization and history. However, at the same time, the artist, taking astronomic incidents like the Juno probe’s active dis-orbition from the Jupiter as the blueprint, sets up the extraterrestrial calendar, with painting language as its scale. The whole exhibition is inquisitive. When did the kindling material brought in by Prometheus go after being used? Is time independent from human beings? Through making inquiries, efforts are made to explore the truth. 

With his paintings as the “mother language”, Jin Han not only “translates” invisible stars, but also guides us to explore unfathomable minuteness and subtleness. “Don’t get an excessively rapid understanding” is the admonishment repeatedly proposed by Lacan while Jin Han uses it to remind the audience who are “reading” his works. “Star charts”, “storm” and “eyeballs” seen by us are all the projection of the signs provided by the artist as “the big other” for the audience. His real purpose is seemingly to suspend a priori knowledge of viewers and continuously raise questions—what is the essence.

As a direction, the “theory” of philosophy has evolved into cosmology, ontology, the theory of being and so on. Philosophers interpret their different viewpoints between different “theories”. Compared with philosophy, the advantage of art lies in that it can tell stories and reason things out in a more intuitive and abstract manner. This advantage is augmented in Jin Han’s works. The universe with alien stars is the “other world” of Jin Han and burning red flame is his spiritual imprint. The elegy about the eventual passing of Juno probe resonates in the clouds and mists of the Jupiter. And the veil of Jupiter is still like what was described by Shelley. “Behind the veil lurk hope and destiny as twins. They are always weaving the shadow on the fissure… Above the scene, a spirit is desperately looking for genuine knowledge”. As for the audience, they can also resort to the entrance of translation offered by Jin Han before marching on and on toward the ladder of the most remote throne!