Justin Rui Han

February 18, 2025

Justin Rui Han (b. 1999, Rochester, NY) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2022, he received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Archaeology from Brown University. Han’s work has been shown at The Artist Room, London, UK; RAINRAIN, New York, NY; HARPER’s, Los Angeles, CA; and Kunsthal N, Copenhagen, DE. Han is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Pilchuck Glass School, The Here and There Collective, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

Can you tell us about your practice?

I work across mediums to congregate unlikely combinations of architecture, tools, ecology, and beings (human or otherwise). For me, each work is a chance to explore the circulation and transmission of cultural and technological ideas. I draw from film stills, archival documents, manuscripts, and direct observation to build spaces rife with possibility.

In describing your studio practice, you’ve said “distorting time is how I prod at what should not be forgotten, invoking our many responsibilities to the living and dead.” How do you go about that distortion?

I think this attitude comes from two distinct facets of what I do: on one hand, I draw from visual resources that span disparate eras and geographies because it allows me to build impossible entanglements; spaces, and scenes whose disjunction can be visually arresting. At times it can feel facetious to take such liberties, so more often now I want the work to be grounded in lived urgency, and to perform a kind of memory work that augments other ways of telling history. I think a culture of forgetting dominates especially in urban environments in the United States, where communities are displaced by infrastructure projects and the residues of these changes are scarcely ever recorded or made public. This may not currently be an active site of inquiry in my work, but it is a category of concern that continually shapes my practice.

Touching on the research that goes into your work, where do those inquiries begin for you? What histories/ideas have you been interested in working with lately?

I’ve been reading and thinking about the materiality of systems for energy and communication, especially under empire: networks of maritime lighthouses in the Dutch East Indies, with the optical and electrical technologies that powered them, and irrigation systems built in India under British colonialism. I’m interested in how historians – Eric Tagliacozzo and Sunil Amrith on these respective subjects – use textual methods to find faults in the logic of their construction, identifying callousness, greed, or latent violence. I like to think that visual methods can be deployed similarly. I want sculpture that can perform a kind of narrative sabotage, or deconstruct technologies that should never have been used in the ways they were.

While at THAT Studio, you started experimenting with mediums outside of the canvas. Can you speak a little about your journey outside of painting and how you approach your sculpture work?

Throughout my art education, I was always learning to work in new materials, and in three dimensions, manipulating clay, wax, glass, and metals. Upon arriving in New York, I limited myself to oil on canvas, both for its familiarity and because it was easiest to access tools for painting. As my life here has stabilized, supported by opportunities like the residency with THAT, I’ve felt emboldened by new artist peers, the financial freedom to amass new tools, and the desire to broaden my abilities. I’ve been building sculptures and assemblages with wood, rattan, handmade and dyed papers, for now, assisted mostly by a jig saw, router, adhesives, spring clamps, and many tubs of water.

What has been inspiring you?

My residency mates at Sharpe Walentas – Pap Souleye Fall, Beck Lowry, and Ellie Krakow have just closed some amazing exhibitions here in NYC (Pap Souleye’s show HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT up until March 15, 2025). Absorbing the breadth of what my peers do leaves me hungry to explore new processes. Music has always propelled my work in the studio – right now, I listen to a lot of guitarist Jeff Parker, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, cornetist Rob Mazurek, and the duo 75 Dollar Bill – all people bending sound in ways that make me want to incorporate acoustic technologies into my work.

What are you investigating these days? Is there anything we can look forward to seeing in the future?

My time in the residency has been somewhat solitary so far – I’m hoping to change that and to begin working with casting and metal again, and to incorporate kinetic or electronic components. I want to build out a few of the sound sculptures I’ve told too many people I’m going to make. I’m working towards open studios (April 26-27) and all are welcome.

Justin Rui Han

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