Jennifer Boyuan Han
Fine Arts MFA
California College of the Arts
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Art Performance
Location: San Francisco, United States
Jennifer Boyuan Han
First Name: Jennifer Boyuan
Last Name: Han
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Art Performance
Sectors:
My Location: San Francisco, United States
University / College: California College of the Arts
Course / Program Title: Fine Arts MFA
About
Jennifer Boyuan Han (b. 1996) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She holds a BFA and MFA from California College of the Arts and is a member of the Asian American Women Artists Association.
Han’s recent practice centers on colored sand as a primary material language through which she investigates image, memory, and shifting identity. Working from archival family photographs from her early childhood, she reconfigures personal and familial imagery through processes of fragmentation, enlargement, and reconstruction. Her work engages diasporic experience as a condition of instability and continual negotiation, where identity is shaped through displacement and partial recollection. By transforming photographic documentation into tactile and unstable material structures, Han reflects on how memory and self-representation are constructed through repetition, distortion, and erosion over time.
Han has exhibited internationally in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Maryland, Rome, Venice, and across China, with solo exhibitions in San Francisco (2018), Nanjing, Shanghai, and Los Angeles (2023). Her work has been presented in institutional, gallery, and art fair contexts, including ICA San Francisco, SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco Art Fair, and Xinqiao Art Complex.
All of the works are made entirely of colored sand. This series began with a box of family photographs taken between 1997 and 1998, when I was one or two years old. I belong to one of the last generations whose earliest memories were preserved through printed photographs than digital images. I barely remember the moments shown in these images. The child in the photographs feels both familiar and distant, like someone I am still trying to understand. Through my sand paintings and surrealist poetry, I reconstruct fragments of memory that exist somewhere between reality and imagination. As an artist born in China and later moving to the United States in 2014, I think about identity through absence, distance, and cultural memory. Returning to these family archives is a way of searching for traces of my roots and asking who I am becoming.
Competitions
