Bruises is a painting series which Han began at the end of 2023, developed in direct response to escalating global unrest and violence. Rather than depicting human figures, she turned to animals and insects — bodies crushed, wings torn, shells fractured, forms pressed into the ground until they become stains, impressions, near-abstract remnants. Paint is layered, smeared, and abraded; the surface itself enacts pressure, repetition, erosion. Each subject hovers between recognition and obliteration, identity dissolving as the work approaches abstraction. The choice of non-human subjects is deliberate — a displacement of the viewer’s habitual defenses, and a structural echo of the dehumanizing logic pervasive in violent rhetoric: when beings are classified as pests, threats, or collateral, their destruction becomes not only permissible but unremarkable. These paintings attempt to make that logic visceral — to give form to the mechanisms by which life is reduced, silenced, and rendered expendable.

The paintings are accompanied by a Kodak Carousel slide projector casting text onto a suspended glass panel — a passage recounting the origin of poetry attributed to the ancient Indian poet Valmiki, in which a hunter’s kill leaves a bird’s mate grieving. Moved by compassion, Valmiki responds with verse: shloka, poetry, born from shoka, grief. Where the paintings trace the violence of erasure, the projected text reclaims grief as the ground of moral consciousness.