Review: Tangles and Ties: Mimi Chen Ting

Originally Published: www.artshiftsanjose.com, November 8, 2008

by Erin Goodwin-Guerrero

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.

Review: Mimi Chen Ting at Art Beatus

Originally Published: Asian Art News, November/December Issue, 2008

by Ian Findlay

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.

Review: Mimi Chen Ting “Southern Comfort”

Originally Published: The Horse Fly, October 15, 2005

by Dory Hulburt

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)