Educated in the fine arts and landscape architecture, Han Sai Por has for decades tirelessly pursued an art practice remarkable for its strength of purpose, enduring vitality, and profound resonance with the natural environment.
While Han is a versatile artist whose body of work includes drawings, paintings and three-dimensional works made from various natural and man-made materials such as wood, paper, metal and glass, it is her nature-inspired, site-specific stone sculptures that, in Singapore and overseas, she is most celebrated for. Hewn from solid masses of stone into often organic, elemental forms, each one is a robust, unobtrusive presence in its site, communicating a silent empathy with the natural environment.
An example is Seeds, a series of four large granite sculptures permanently installed along Esplanade’s Waterfront. Seeds are a recurring subject matter for the sculptor. Symbolising the germination of the arts on fertile ground, these ones sit so gently on the site, they seem to have sprouted from the earth.
In Singapore, where the landscape undergoes change at a brutal pace and too often with scant regard for flora, fauna, heritage or the preservation of older, slower ways of life, Han’s works have particular resonance. Commissioned by Esplanade as a solo exhibition in Jendela in 2011, The Black Forest continued Han’s enduring theme of concern for the natural environment with a different approach. A singular work composed of a series of paintings, drawings and a central installation, The Black Forest marked the first time Han was showing her paintings primarily rather than her sculptures.
What they revealed was just as significant – a palpable shift in temperament. For while Han’s previous works have always been characterised by an intense quiet, the pieces in The Black Forest, although enveloped still by a sense of hush, exuded great disquiet.
They depicted skeletal remains and gnarled, twisting tree branches, roots and trunks in bleak landscapes of the mind painted in varying shades of black, with found materials such as stumps of wood and charcoal pieces rendered into an installation that contributed to the overall impression of a wasteland.
