Han Bing hesitates to describe her work as abstract, since she takes inspiration from city streets and architectural façades. She calls these urban elements “poems with authors unknown.” Describing her paintings, Han said that “they are representational at times, but more moments of perplexity, when a few patches met unexpectedly and created a dynamic that made sense to me at that moment.”

Han’s layered, jagged shapes conjure the posters torn and replaced, ad infinitum, in the New York City subway stations; her soft scrawls in white and bright yellow suggest graffiti. In some canvases, a representational section adds a moment of surprise.