During Jiaxi Han’s residency, her creative process followed principles found in D.T. Suzuki’s books on Zen in the library, particularly the idea that Zen deals directly with reality—not with concepts, abstractions, or logic, and that Zen reveals truths in the most concrete forms, grasped through appearance and intuition.
Over the four weeks, Jiaxi Han gathered images from the books of crop circles, weather signs and diagrams, and patterns from the artist’s hometown Miao culture and local Appenzeller folk art and craft. Using ink on Chinese rice paper, she transformed these into about 150 small sketches. This approach which merges the medium from the artist’s traditional culture with patterns from different cultural backgrounds creates a visual dialogue.
The sketches evolved according to visual relationships—similarities, contrasts, and transformations—between images, much like the logic in the dream Freud described, where meaning is carried through visual connections rather than linguistic structures.
The artist also created short poems and practiced ensō during the residency. While the poems do not strictly follow the haiku form, they capture moments, people, and the surrounding nature with directness and immediacy.
Jiaxi Han’s residency work drew from various books spanning meteorology, UFOs, crop circles, ethnography, Zen, poetry, and ghost stories. She drifted naturally between these topics, drawing unexpected connections and envisioning new ways of narrating the library’s collections. The resulting sketches serve as groundwork for her future, larger works and provide a foundation for discussing specific discourses, greatly benefiting the artist’s ongoing practice.
Some of these sketches will be exhibited in Bacio Collective Bern in a group show from Nov 9 – Dec 8, 2024.
October 2024
Text + Fotos: Jiaxi Han