13 July 2026
Artist Highlight - Daosheng Han
Interview and Review
Daosheng Han (b. 2001, Shandong) is an artist based in Guangzhou and London. He holds a BA in Oil Painting from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and is pursuing an MA at Chelsea College of Arts. Investigating the intricate dynamics between individuals and communities, his practice spans painting, installation, archives, and moving image. Han received the Xu Qinsong Creation Award Silver Prize (2024) and has exhibited widely internationally, including solo show at the Guangdong Contemporary Art Center,group show at Crypt Gallery. His work addresses individual survival and societal structures.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. LC＊＊W＊＊ uses a car licence plate, an object that is designed to identify but is rarely looked at closely. What made you want to bring it into the space of painting?
A license plate is essentially an identification tool serving the traffic control system; although ubiquitous, it is rarely examined closely. Bringing it into the space of painting strips away its utilitarian functionality. More importantly, it creates an opportunity for viewers to cast an emotional gaze upon a symbol otherwise saturated with systemic discipline.
2. A licence plate carries information, control and public visibility. What changes when it is removed from the street and placed on canvas?
Its role shifts from an administrative tool to a visual signifier. It is transformed from a shackle that binds individual identity into a visual object that is, in turn, scrutinized and interrogated by the individual.
3. Your work combines the language of tracking with vivid colour and humour. How do you use wit without reducing the seriousness of the subject?
The quantification and discipline imposed on individuals by urban systems are incredibly cold, oppressive, and even brutal. If I were to paint them in a similarly cold, somber, and monochromatic palette, I would merely be replicating the system's own sense of oppression. Instead, highly saturated colors are deployed to capture and arrest the viewer's gaze; I intend to obscure the gravity of the underlying theme, burying it deep beneath the vibrant surface.
4. The blurred informational imagery suggests that identity is present, but not fully readable. Is this about protection, erasure, or both?
I see it as both protection and deprivation. For the beneficiaries, the blurred image acts as a shield to conceal or shroud their identity. However, for the uninitiated—or even for non-human entities—it functions more like a form of deprivation, forcing them to submit to a human-centric power structure.
5. You speak about the city as a matrix in which identities are coded and measured. How does the individual survive within that structure?
This has always been a central motif in my work: individual survival within such communities is inherently awkward and precarious. There is a constant friction and entanglement between personal desires and the compliance required for sheer survival.
6. There is a feeling of closeness and alienation in the work at the same time. Does that contradiction reflect your experience of urban life?
Yes, absolutely, and it is often triggered by very minute details—such as hostile architecture on the streets or the constriction of space around transport infrastructure. These everyday encounters constantly manifest as an invasion into one’s personal, informational space.
7. Your work seems to ask whether public systems become strange only when we stop accepting them as normal. What do you hope viewers notice after seeing LC＊＊W＊＊?
I hope it prompts viewers to confront the realization that they are already living in a fundamentally domesticated and disciplined state.
THE COLOUR OF COMPLIANCE
Review by Chih-Yang Chen, Art Director
Daosheng Han’s LC＊＊W＊＊ begins with an object so ordinary that it is almost invisible: the car licence plate.
It is one of the most familiar visual systems of contemporary life. We encounter thousands of them, register them subconsciously, and move on. Designed for identification, surveillance, and administration, licence plates operate within a language of efficiency rather than reflection. Their purpose is not to be looked at but to be read.
Daosheng disrupts this condition by relocating the licence plate from the street to the canvas.
This shift is deceptively simple. Once removed from its utilitarian context, the licence plate ceases to function as an instrument of control and instead becomes an object of contemplation. What was once designed to observe us becomes something we are invited to observe. The direction of scrutiny reverses.
At the heart of the work is a fascination with the systems that quietly organise everyday life. Urban existence is increasingly structured through codes, databases, registrations, and forms of categorisation that often remain invisible precisely because they are so familiar. The licence plate becomes a potent symbol of this condition. It represents a system in which identity is translated into information, where the individual is rendered legible through a sequence of numbers and letters.
Yet LC＊＊W＊＊ avoids the visual language one might expect from a critique of surveillance. Rather than adopting a cold or dystopian aesthetic, Daosheng embraces saturation, humour, and visual seduction. Bright colours pull viewers in before revealing the darker structures that lie beneath.
This strategy is crucial.
As Daosheng notes, to represent systems of control through equally oppressive visual language would merely replicate their logic. Instead, colour functions as camouflage. The work conceals its seriousness beneath a playful surface, encouraging viewers to engage before recognising the underlying tension. What initially appears vibrant and inviting gradually reveals itself as something more uneasy.
The blurred informational imagery reinforces this ambiguity. Information is present but withheld. Identity appears visible yet inaccessible. This condition operates simultaneously as protection and exclusion. The blur shields certain subjects while denying access to others. In doing so, it mirrors the uneven distribution of power embedded within systems of visibility and recognition.
There is also an important contradiction running through the work: intimacy and alienation coexist. Licence plates are deeply familiar objects, tied to daily movement through the city. Yet they also embody forms of bureaucratic distance, reducing individuals to data points within larger administrative frameworks. The painting captures this tension with remarkable precision.
Daosheng’s broader concern lies in the precarious relationship between individuals and social systems. Throughout the work, one senses the awkward negotiation between personal desire and institutional expectation. Survival within contemporary urban life requires participation in structures that simultaneously enable and constrain us. Compliance becomes unavoidable, yet never entirely comfortable.
What makes LC＊＊W＊＊ particularly effective is its attention to the subtle forms through which power operates. Rather than focusing on overt mechanisms of control, Daosheng points towards the mundane details that shape daily experience: infrastructure, hostile architecture, transportation systems, and informational networks. The work suggests that discipline is not something imposed dramatically from above, but something woven quietly into the fabric of ordinary life.
In this sense, the licence plate becomes more than a symbol of identification.
It becomes a portrait of contemporary citizenship itself.
Not because it tells us who we are, but because it reveals the systems through which we are made visible.
Daosheng Han’s LC＊＊W＊＊ asks an unsettling question:
What if the strangest thing about these systems is not that they exist, but that we have become so accustomed to them?