In Han Beishi’s “Mask Beywa” series, at CharmyArt in Shanghai’s M50 arts complex, the cartoon image of a little girl in a frog costume repeats like the recurring pangs of one’s own conscience. Sometimes she appears near wounded animals or in dying landscapes. She seems hurt herself, bandaged, fragile but resilient, carrying her own little survival or self-help manual. The artist was inspired by learning that frogs, extra-vulnerable to environmental changes, are bellwethers for climate collapse. Beywa, the little girl, becomes a bellwether for humanity’s own wounded presence on the Earth.

Frogs (and amphibians more broadly) are considered one of the most important indicator species in environmental science. Frogs have permeable skin that easily absorbs chemicals, toxins, and radiation from their surroundings. They live both in water and on land, so they’re exposed to a wide range of environmental factors. This makes them especially vulnerable to water pollution (e.g., pesticides, fertilizers, industrial runoff), airborne pollutants, UV radiation, rising temperatures, and changes in rainfall.

Because of this sensitivity, frogs often sicken, deform, or disappear before other species are affected, making them a crucial early-warning system for environmental collapse. Frogs are, in fact, among the most endangered groups of animals on the planet. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, around 40% of amphibian species are at risk of extinction. Their rapid decline is a red flag for scientists, warning that the planet’s biological systems are under extreme stress.

Beyond science, frogs are culturally and symbolically rich, found in mythology, children's stories, and spiritual traditions worldwide. Their loss is not just ecological but emotional and symbolic. In Han Beishi’s art, they become metaphors for vulnerability, innocence, and ecological tragedy.

The Chinese characters for frog and child both have the same sound ‘wa,’ and in traditional folk art, the symbol of the frog represents fertility and good fortune. By placing a human child, perhaps the most universally sympathetic figure, into the symbolic skin of a frog, the artist attempts to remove the boundary between human and nonhuman suffering.

The girl wishes to attune herself to the frog’s suffering as a shaman might try to connect to spirit animals. Her injuries mirror the damage to the environment. Her costume is not playful, it's elegiac. We can no longer pretend nature is “out there.” Its destruction is our destruction, and we’re wearing it now. Indeed, the girl also wears a mask in this series (thus it is the “Mask Beywa” series), inspired by the SARS outbreak of 2003. She wears the mask as if prepared for further unavoidable and perhaps inevitable pandemics.

Just as frogs are bellwethers of ecological collapse, the child in the frog outfit becomes a human bellwether about the physical, spiritual, and emotional cost of environmental loss. She is both messenger and message. Her wounds remind us that even the most innocent are not spared. In this way, the image critiques our failure to protect both nature and children, our future.

Her survival manual is a pitiful symbol of her concern, her desire to be of service, and her helplessness, as she seems on a journey to try to heal both herself and nature by herself, pitted against the huge forces of greed, selfishness, and wasteful economic systems.

Children often use costumes to play. Here, that instinct is transformed: play yields to mourning. There’s a theatrical sadness here, a child performing in a tragedy too big for her to even understand. The frog-girl is like a new mythic being, a tragic figure for the Anthropocene, injured and watchful, bearing witness to a world that is unraveling.

Yet, there’s a flicker of hope in this series (which Han Beishi has been pursuing for more than a decade). Compassion depends on identification. The girl in the frog outfit invites us to empathize deeply with nature, not abstractly, but bodily. The little girl in a frog costume is a mirror, showing us what we’ve done to the Earth and a warning that we’re not separate from nature’s fate.

She is also a prayer for connection, for care, and for a different future. She appears quietly, wounded, dressed for extinction, but still human, still hopeful enough to show up in costume, as if someone might still listen, as if she can figure out a solution that actually might be listened to.

Han Beishi’s Beywa series offers a quiet but penetrating voice. These mixed-media works, primarily acrylic on canvas or ink and color on paper, often combine gentle imagery with deceptively simple poetry, creating a deeply humanistic meditation on the fragility of life, the environment and the moral contradictions of modern existence (we work hard at providing for human existence and comfort while destroying ourselves and the planet at the same time).

At the core of Han Beishi’s work is empathy. His paintings offer animals, objects, and even abstract forms a kind of voice. The Deep (2010) portrays a drowning figure as an inner monologue of survival. The accompanying poem is: “In the deep water, I only try to tilt my head upward, so as not to be suffocated by the dirty water.” It is a plea for dignity in overwhelmingly hostile conditions: physical, emotional, or societal.

Many works are similarly intimate. In I’m Also a Flower (2011), a once-wild flower now sits lonely in a vase, its former freedom reduced to decorative stillness. Grass Horse (2011) evokes rest and companionship, lying on one’s back, sleeping through the years, waking to a changed world.

Goodbye Rhino (2012) is an elegy for a species vanishing under human violence. In Hello Beluga! (2012), the artist acknowledges the limits of art itself: “I cannot stop it all, so I use paint to preserve the colors of life.” This, then, is art as ethical witness. Han Beishi quietly invites viewers to feel the loss, to recognize the steady extinction of beauty.

His ecological criticism often blends with human folly and spiritual malaise. Shark’s Smile (2016) is particularly dark: the predator now reduced to prey, a culinary accessory on the human menu. Where To Go (2012) asks a terrifyingly simple question: when Earth’s resources are exhausted, where will we go?

This philosophical tone becomes more mythic in later works like Monkey King: Hero Returns (2019), in which Han channels Chinese folklore to lament moral decay: “The rivers are polluted, fish extinct... Demon-greed rules. Where is the golden-eyed sage?”

Han Beishi’s visual style is deliberately accessible and childlike with round forms, soft lines and minimalistic backgrounds. But beneath the gentle colors lie ominous concerns. In Dream on the Balloon (2016), floating spheres become unreachable symbols of hope, echoing childhood dreams deferred.

His more recent works reflect on COVID-era anxiety and resilience. Waiting for the Spring Breeze (2021) shows nature in stasis, people in masks, and “strange stones and dead trees” lying dormant. Yet even in this stillness, there is faith that spring will come.

Han Beishi’s words and images work together like haiku and ink wash. In Let There Be Light (2018), the poem reads: “Borrow a beam of light / to break through darkness and fog / so that life is no longer helpless.” The tone is meditative, but never passive. This is moral clarity expressed through humility. He presents the natural world as sacred, suffering as universal and compassion as a form of everyday resistance. In this way, Beywa is not just a painting series, it is a moral worldview.