Atlas, the first-ever exhibition of Han Bing’s work in the UK, presents new paintings alongside a series of works on paper, executed in the artist’s signature style, on found pages of newspaper. The exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of the city as a site of image-making – an ever-shifting topography where forms collide in vivid and unexpected ways.
Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition
Based in Paris, Han Bing was born in China and has lived in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. Her paintings develop from the visual impressions that she gathers and unconsciously absorbs as she moves through cityscapes, rather than from direct representation. She is particularly drawn to the remnants of advertisements and posters she sees on the subway and the street; how these ripped compositions, accumulated over time like strata, create a palimpsest that ‘infiltrates the texture of the city’.
Atlay, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint on canvas
172.7 x 203.2 cm (68 x 80 in)
As Doris von Drathen says, ‘She is searching for a particular moment: when the surfaces of posters, wherever they might be – on the facades of buildings or in the metro’s corridors – mutate within a continual process of transformation; when they are painted over, torn down, when eventually the bill poster pastes thick glue over them, spreading out and smoothing over one folded square after another.’
The good witch, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint on canvas
177.8 x 143 cm (70 x 56.30 in)
Being Alive Being Alive Being Alive, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint
172.7 x 203.2 cm (67.99 x 80 in)
The poetic and often playful titles Han Bing gives her works navigate an internal landscape, filtering passing thoughts and interests, fragments of overheard conversation, song lyrics and lines from films, without offering fixed meaning. Atlas, the title of the exhibition, refers not only to the Titan of ancient Greek mythology, condemned to bear the weight of the heavens for eternity, but also to the first vertebra of the human spine, which, located at the top of the neck, supports the head and carries nerve signals between the brain and the body.
The things I'd do To spend a little time in Hell, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint
172.7 x 263.2 cm (67.99 x 103.62 in)
— Doris von Drathen
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint on canvas
177.8 x 143 cm (70 x 56.30 in)
Microwave cowboy, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint on canvas
172.7 x 203.2 cm (67.30 x 80 in)
Like the recursive, accidental mark-making that occurs between objects in urban environments, in this important body of work, the artist layers spontaneous painterly abstractions over daily news to generate chance meanings. Dapples of vibrantly coloured pigment graze and splatter the newsprint, obscuring columns of text and photographs like light leaks. The effect extends the artist’s interest in the uncanny, as this common, everyday ephemera becomes a site of visual disruption. Han Bing reminds us that in a city, images are never fixed but are continually transforming, accumulating new meanings like patina.
The island, 2025
Acrylic on paper
18.8 x 28.1 cm (7.40 x 11.06 in)
Imagery infiltrates her work, caught beneath streaks of paint and jagged planes of electric colour that are continually scraped back and reworked over several months. Han Bing works directly onto the canvas, sketching what she describes as the compositional ‘skeleton’, already loosely formed in her mind, before adding layers of colour: the ‘tissue’. She is known for the uncanny disruptions she stages on the painterly surface, combatting familiar or recognisable elements with distinctive marks that resemble tears or glitches. In They told me it only gets better (2025), a domestic table scene reminiscent of a page from an interiors magazine is ruptured by a large, faceted form that the artist describes as a kind of ‘punch’.
They told me it only gets better, 2025
Oil paint, oil stick and spray paint on canvas
177.8 x 143 cm (70 x 56.30 in)
Based in Paris, Han Bing was born in China in 1986 and has lived in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. She holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and a BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Her first solo exhibition in a French institution took place at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, in 2024, and her work has also been shown in exhibitions at institutions including National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022 and 2024); and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2020), among others. Her first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, Han Bing: got heart, was presented in the Paris Marais gallery in 2023.
