In Echo is the first solo exhibition of American artist Han Shan in Venice. Bringing together a series of layered collages and two works on canvas, through distinct projects linked by mutual thematics and propinquities, this show intends to journey across several perceptive matters including memory and remembrance, acceptance and grief, past, present and future, hopes and disbeliefs… After leaving behind his art practice to dedicate and devote himself to Human Rights and Environmental Activism, Han Shan moved in 2018 from New York City to a small town in Lombardy where he ultimately “returned to drawing and painting after a hiatus of nearly twenty-five years.”
With his insightful way of perceiving what has been done and undone, felt or forgotten and what will be done and undone, unfelt or remembered, Han Shan evokes in a subtle yet striking manner universal philosophical and historical issues, answering; however, to a particularly intimate and introspective need to stimulate “emotion and drama in gesture, movement, and color.”

While Embolus is a series of collages mixing superposed prints, drawing and paintings based on a commemorative plaque referring to a WWII Resistance blockade in the vicinity of Menaggio, it also brings to light its contradictory meaning and intent; a blockade for liberation, true paradox of semantics and symbology. This unexpectedly engaging installation, formed by a myriad of layers, is in reality a reflection on memorialization and the duty of remembrance, attempting to operate as a monument to the existential and the factual. On another hand, the word Embolus designates an amalgam in the bloodstream that can cause a blockage, hence hinting at the pragmatic fragility of the body, lodging Han Shan’s practice in the blood and the flesh…
Following this train of thoughts, this pluridimensional approach takes a step further into bringing to the forefront the correlation between human actions, body and psyche with You Missed My Heart and Rosa dei Venti, two different and yet extremely complementary paintings. While the first one is a raw survival testimony of the constant mutual fashioning between memory and future, via the physicality of pain, where the red-painted words seem caught up in the act of scarifying the canvas. The second one, Rosa dei Venti, or Compass Rose in English, can be recognized as a proper Vanitas, meant to offer a perpetual warning on the transience of life, but also as a reminder of the past, an acknowledgment of what have been lost, and a suggestion on what direction should be taken.

As put by John Dewey “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” In Echo aims in this sense to invite the audience to remember, question, contemplate and recognize History, human actions and their impact, commemorate and mark timeless times, to move forward and get going.

Exhibition curated and organized by Yasmine Helou, in collaboration with Hesperia Iladou Suppiej