Jeannine Han
I am an artist living and working in New York where you’ll often find me in the studio exploring materiality through sculpture and
films. My interest lies in the happenstance of daily life, where alternate realities emerge from lived experiences. Maintaining a diaristic practice to annotate interiors thoughts on modern technology, materiality, and image-based aesthetics of the human form, transitions into non-linear narratives for scripts and
storyboards. These become the reference point for traversing different scenes and spaces where visual idioms can connect to wider sensorial spectrums. I often leverage creating characters
to simulate experiences that offer multiple perspectives of the world, a common character is the avatar who brings artificial intelligence in mirroring the human emotional tenor. Ultimately, to further explore the idea of shared selves that may give insights of the ‘elusive other’. This allows me to approach a succession of works to materialize the many incarnations and pathways where sensory signals are overtly heightened through the terrain of moving images, text, sound and touch. I find that in art making, it has the ability to increase a spirited tension from the ‘real world’ and in that function, replaces the connection from reality to other imaginative fields.
Alongside my studio practice, I am a dedicated teacher in art and design. Currently I’m teaching at several different academic institutions; FIT NY, Parsons, The New School and Pratt Institute
in various disciplines and technologies. In addition, to my teaching practice, I have undertaken social projects in Kampala Uganda, creating a solar textile material capable of distilling water for disastrous relief. Most recently, I’ve worked on a project centered to human dignity in collaboration with Parsons,
and UNFPA where the aim is to provide accessible women’s reproductive health wearable products in areas where governments
have marginalized or completely ignored women’s issues. Being able to contribute in immediate social problems is an important
aspect to why I teach. This has also transcended in my the art-making process where I’ve been able to work on ethnographic research that involves ethical ecosystems for textile production as a way to direct empathy of contemporary concerns in the
applied arts. Fieldwork for this topic has included research in Peru and Indonesia to create an experimental anthropological film
on traditional textiles. The concept was to document the physical patterns and traditions in textile where an entire landscape of objects are created that both reference and provide a
counterpoint to their origin. I’m interested in how multiple expressions can root themselves in the same pattern/textile, and the technological instrument (backstrap loom and jacquard looms) can become the catalyst for expressing the human body/form. This has been an on-going research of study, to discover and annotate the system of meanings through the film and a collection of textiles from my love of traveling.