Reviews

Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1970
Central Paradox: ...However, Mimi Chen Ting is displaying some exquisitely delicate and sensitive landscape abstractions involving sinuous outlines, pastel colors and silvery halos that seem to float over ridges and horizons like the fog banks in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. She has a way to go technically, but her work reflects a nicely poetic and personal sensibility.

Salli Robertson, Artweek, May 21, 1977
Mimi Chen Ting's Bereavement Unveiled is a delicate mist - an apparition from the collective unconscious. Ting's paintings are abstract and contemporary; however, they invoke a characteristically Oriental approach to space.

Dorothy Burkhart, San Jose Mercury News, Apr. 4, 1986
Pretty in Pastel: Magically luminous art seduces the viewer. The exhibition spans pale, sensitive portraits of women, babies and cats by Eleanor Dickinson and the dark, mysterious image of monkeys by Michael Mazur. In between are symbolic and romantic renderings, color drenched abstractions (Mimi Chen Ting) and Joseph Goldyne's realist, intensely personal picture of a bookshelf.

Signe Mayfield, The Art Corridor, 1986
A special brilliance, luminosity, velvety matt texture, and magical presence.....light travels as a live wire to modulate color changes in the smoothed spatial territory of (Ting's) two abstract pastels.

Henry Woon, East/West News, Oct. 15, 1987
Triton Museum in Santa Clara Features Asian American Artists: Two oil paintings at the exhibition immediately puts me into good spirits. One was of a lady smiling and the other was the same lady watching her children playing through a partially drawn curtain. The painter is Mimi Chen Ting, whose work I thought was solely abstracts and which I had come into contact at the Oakland Resource Gallery.

Holly Johnson, The Sacramento Union, Feb. 8, 1992
It's a Bold Fresh Gathering: ...And a mythical quality imbues "Re-Creation" by Mimi Chen ting, a moody acrylic on canvas featuring a faceless, featureless nude reaching toward a spiraling sun. It's a flat, Matisse-like design bare of detail, the right angles of the window frames adding a hint of geometry.

Ross Owens, Santa Clara Valley Weekly, Nov. 12-18, 1992
Mysticism (is) brought to the foreground.....Ting's paintings seem like artifacts from some Jungian dreamscape.

Ann Elliot Sherman, Metro, Jan.713, 1993
The Incredibly delicate aurora borealis effect.....the pure light emanating.....these need no translation.

J. Pointer, Taos Magazine, May, 1993
Space as Cornucopia: The art of Mimi Chen Ting delineates the poetic space between life's dualities -birth / death, separation / unity, memory / invention. There is a luminous intelligence at work here, as comfortable with big themes as it is delighted by small, playful moments. Best yet, it is accessible magic. We need no interest in philosophy to appreciate the handsome, colorful geometry of these monotypes and acrylics on canvas. Her explorations are elegant tidings, honoring all pauses and digressions, in forms of mandalas and grids, moons, sculptural figures, and small signature slashes of contrasting colors that invite dance in so much room to move. In this artist's disciplined hands, space becomes a cornucopia.

The serendipity of printmaking accommodates her wit, vigor, and literary proclivities. Her big acrylic canvases are remarkable for the flatness of effect, which has been compared to that of Matisse. She resemble (Matisse) in others ways too: color and drama. As turned an everyday parlor in to stage, Ting makes theatre of ordinary dreams and spontaneous associations. It is her tracking of the tension, its unpredictable rhythm, that dramatizes the ultimate refinement of her canvases. The viewer is dafely seated in the eye of a hurricane, and in her best work, Ting, like Matisse, uncovers the grandeur in tranquility.

Rick Romancito, Tempo, June 3, 1993
The grace of each brushstroke, in concert with her tightly composed large canvases, leads the viewer's eye on a journey that is both aesthetically pleasing and contemplative.

Salli McQuaid, ArtistWriter, April, 1994
Two Opposing Senses: From the beginning (mid 1970s) there was an aura of serenity about Ting's work, as if she achieved a kind of peace when she painted. Early work dealt with organic form, pushing paint, color and perfect, flat, surface. Later imagery grew more complicated, enigmatic, if you will, but still there was that aura of serenity. Later work, although spawed by the vast, often untouched and serene land of New Mexico, began with huge, pudgy, genielike figures that literally dealt with balance and had virtually no reference to the land. Work in the vurrent show examines more decisively the relationship between figure and land, and employs gestural brushwork within always controlled spaces, offering textural as well as visual complication and depth. There is a magical glow, an aura of serenity, evoked in Ting's present exhibition. Here, the viewer can sit in the midst of the paintings and experience the beauty and spirituality of the southwest land. Mystery is provided through organic figures and shapes. Her colors are many: warm and rich.

Salli McQuaid, ArtistWriter, 1996
Goodbye, Russel: Appropriately, at the entry was Beyond the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a large, mystical and figurative work by Mimi Chen Ting. Here, the central, curled figure resembles a cloud, and although the gate is angular, the overall mood is serene.

Dory Hulburt, the Horse Fly, April 15, 2005
La Madre Poderosa: Freelance curator Olga Torres-Reid's exhibits unearth ancient veins in modern-day traditions (and revive ancient traditions, a la her Día de Los Muertos celebrations). With Mother's Day coming up May 8, Torres-Reid's current exhibit at the Harwood Museum burrows underneath the multi-tasking, harried, nurturing, negligent, working, guilty motherhood we hear so much about, to a realm that encompasses much more: Powerful Mother. The 19 artists invited to create altars on the theme reflect a broad spectrum of attitudes, from love to fear.

Mimi Chen Ting renders Mother with great love and tenderness in her mixed-media "Compass-Ion." She's fluid, in motion, infinite. Her body extends off the canvas, and is encased in a red circle: intimations of blood, womb, and warmth. The altar is a square niche in the center of the piece, at a powerful site on Mother's body: the tan tien, the sea of chi, the cauldron, the Manipura chakra, the source of healing. The site is also that of Mother's womb and yoni, signifying her receptivity, the yin, the feminine. Mimi ingeniously constructed the piece in four rectangles that fit together in such a way as to leave the center-the altar-empty. In essence, the piece is a spiral, a vortex, converging at the altar. According to a ribbon of Chinese calligraphy: "The embrace of compassion knows no bounds and never tires."

The show continues through June 12.

"What a joy to review such a beautiful, elemental piece" -DH-

Dory Hulburt, the Horse Fly, July 15, 2005
East Meets West: Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-raised Mimi Chen Ting came to the U.S. to attend college and had her first solo exhibition at San Francisco's Lucien Gallery in 1970. Movement is a common thread in her printmaking, painting, and performance art. In her figurative work, she tends to forego details and distill human figures into primal elements—head, hands, and feet with bodies in motion: symbols of us rather than us.

For the Asian show, the Harwood has hung three of Mimi's abstracts, bold acrylics in forceful colors with weighty forms obedient to the physical laws of another reality. In "Hanging on This Side of Blue," three hefty forms orbit each other with string curling between them. They could be geographic formations seen from a great distance, or a microscopic view of something unrecognizable—but their spatial relationship achieves a kind of grace that reminds me of the space-station rendezvous to the tune of Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz" in "2001: Space Odyssey."

Mimi currently is working on a series of abstract paintings in which she focuses on string, or ribbon—its shapes, colors, and, needless to say, its movement.

Dory Hulburt, the Horse Fly, Oct. 15, 2005
Fall Arts Top 10: 3. Mimi Chen Ting: "Southern Comfort"
A female figure transfixed in a doorway; a pyramidal structure—house or cliff; dashes of green suggesting a landscape; a swirl of claret-color rising upward. There was a startling amount of white space in Chen Ting's crisp mixed-media piece. She provided barely enough cues to trigger the imagination—she left her sky white; she didn't detail the terrain unifying those green smudges; she didn't provide a context for the claret ribbon curlicuing into the sky; and she relied solely on form, not expression to suggest the woman's astonishment. Too little information leaves viewers adrift in meaninglessness. There are canvases everywhere replete with details that sedate the mind. "Southern Comfort" teetered on the brink of too little—breathtakingly. (Invitational)

Erin Goodwin-Guerrero, ARTSHIFTSANJOSE.COM, November 8, 2008
The Tangles and Ties of Human Relations: Mimi Chen Ting is a native of Shanghai, China, who received her graduate degree from San Jose State University. She was a resident of San Jose, and showed her work in the Bay Area until the early nineties, when she moved to Taos, New Mexico. Since that time she has shown extensively throughout the West and in the Southwest. The latest among her forays to international sites is her Fall 2008 exhibition at the Gallery Art Beatus, in Hong Kong.

Tangles and Ties is a selection of crisply painted and graphically interpreted narratives of human adventure, based initially on Ting's observation of the lives of her friends. Our expectations, unexpected obstacles and turns of fortune, our social, psychological and physiological challenges are laid out like a road-map that lacks the logic of topographical causality. There are clogged arteries, detours and misleading shortcuts, and paths that overlap but never intersect. The figure-ground relationship is one of foreground-background, suggesting that we rarely achieve a fully integrated status with the landscape we attempt to navigate.

In some cases, Ting gives a clue as to what that terrain may be through the colors and large shapes that loom behind our trajectory. Some situations seem cold, almost hostile and impenetrable, yet others are warm and earthy. The pathways she paints are pretty smooth, graceful and unmarred by real scarring. In the end, Ting may believe we (her friends) are privileged creatures that, for all our blindness and foolishness, sail off-course frequently but rarely founder completely. She clearly believes in human resilience. Would that this be so for all humanity on earth. It would be nice to see us become one with our ecosystem, heal the earth and our human relations before it is too late.

Ian Findlay, Asian Art News, November/December Issue, 2008
Mimi Chen Ting at Art Beatus: How to express one's experience in life, as well as those of others around one, on canvas is a constant challenge for any artist. Whether or not one is working in the figurative or the abstract, the problems relating experience and controlling its expression so that the viewer is touched by it requires that the artist is a keen observer. This means possessing a close understanding not only of one's external world and relationships but also one's interior world and how both sides collide to become one within the painting. Mimi Chen Ting clearly understands these things and has put them to good use.

There is both a subtle energy and a deep sense of longing in the recent acrylic works that make up her compact exhibition entitled Tangles and Ties. The energy of a good many of her abstract works resides in her flowing, intersecting lines that remind one of the lyrical qualities found within the last works of Willem de Kooning. The energy of Chen Ting's figurative painting, from a decade ago, is suggested by the lugubrious movement of the body in space and the almost pastel quality of her colors..

At first glance, the lines appear to be random, as if the artist is playing with the long thin forms of the line, trying to work out how they should play across the surface of the painting until they trail off the edges of the picture plane. But as one continues to look at the rhythm the artist has created, one realizes that there is nothing random here, that the artist has in fact taken control of the lines as she has with her emotions.

The control is seemingly effortless but he thickness of her lines and the colors that she employs in her Tangles and Ties series (2006), for example, emphasizes a studied and careful geometry. Lines and space meet harmoniously within the mostly monochromatic backgrounds also help to emphasize space and suggest the kind of emptiness that one feels in a time of emotional turmoil.

In Chen Ting's recent Confetto series (2008), the line has given way to blocks and layers of bright color. In the layering there is a sense of organic forms moving together in search of unity, yet never quite achieving it. Still there is a sense of pleasure, even joy, in such work. The empty space that was defined by the line in Tangles and Ties is now filled with the energy of activity, and a feeling that passion has won over sadness.