Westbund Art & Design | 2025: Sophie Mei Birkin and JIN Han

Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to announce its debut at West Bund Art & Design, presenting a duo booth featuring new works by British artist Sophie Mei Birkin and Chinese artist JIN Han. Both explore transformation as a universal language, from the slow alchemy of matter beneath the sea to the transmission of unseen energy across the cosmos. Through their distinct practices, Birkin and JIN each trace the invisible systems that shape material, time, and perception.

Sophie Mei Birkin’s sculptural series I didn’t ask to be dredged draws from her research into the 18th-century Ca Mau shipwreck and its lost cargo of ceramic tea bowls. Aged and transformed beyond use, these fragments became fused and encrusted with marine organisms. Birkin mirrors this slow, transformative process - matter burns, fuses, and is reborn. The resulting ceramics are enveloped by natural forms, exploring the emergence of contrasting materialities through the collision of human artefacts with both organic and synthetic matter. 

This meditation on transformative temporality finds a cosmic counterpart in JIN Han’s work, where the scale of time expands from centuries to millennia. In his snowflakes series, JIN imagines snowflakes as elemental creations - carriers of residual microwaves from the Big Bang, bearing encrypted messages across space and time.

Working across painting and woodcut, JIN visualises these unseen landscapes. In the Magnetic Field and Diamond Star series, he studies the delicate geometry of snowflakes as both scientific and metaphysical patterns. Using carving and shimmering metallic inks, he reveals tension between surface and depth, between what appears and what hums beneath.

Together, Birkin and JIN approach transformation from two elemental realms - water and air, the earthly and the cosmic. Birkin’s artefacts rise from sediment and salt; JIN’s constellations emerge from vibration and void. Both chart the entanglement between human history and natural process, between what is made and what is beyond making. Their works form an ecosystem of continual becoming - where matter, memory, and imagination circulate like tides or magnetic fields.