Artist: Han Meilin
Artwork: Two Panda (2017)
Materials: bronze
Measures: 93 x 82 x 74 cm
The panda sculptures were donated by the artist in 2017 to VIU following the exhibition "The World of Han Meilin in Venice" Exhibition, organized by Università Ca' Foscari, Venice International University, the China-Italy Dialogue Association, and The Han Meilin Foundation. The exhibition has been open from October 2017 to February 2018: 200 works were on display in the courtyards and halls of the main Palace of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Han Meilin has chosen Venice as an evocative point of departure for a world tour that will take him around Europe and then on to the Americas, the Middle East and India.
"Han Meilin - affirmed Ambassador Umberto Vattani, Curator of the Exhibition together with Prof. Zhao Li - has adeptly created his own fantasy universe, populated by alluring creatures, and animals interpreted according to the positive or negative characteristics attributed to them in the Chinese tradition, or even, using objects, engraved woods, fabrics, bronzes, all realized with an artistry that has deep roots in the past and is yet projected towards the future.
“We have brought to Venice - continued Ambassador Umberto Vattani - over 200 of his works, from the expansive collections in the three Museums dedicated to him by the government of the P.R. of China, in Beijing, Hangzhou and Yinchuan. In all of the works there is an unmistakable imprinting, typical of the Maestro: a defence of the incompleteness of a world that is yet to come. Han Meilin himself, in his art, bears witness to this concept, citing Leonardo Da Vinci who evoked: "Iron rusts from disuse; (...)... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind"; an aphorism that brings him, at the age of 80, to engage in a world tour because, as he prefers to say, he is just four times twenty years old".
"Han Meilin's visit to Venice - highlighted Ambassador Vattani - represents a further challenge for the artist and an opportunity to nourish his inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, by experimenting with a material that as yet he has not had the opportunity to try: blown glass."
