Artist Profile: Mimi Chen Ting by Stephanie Grilli

Originally Published: Art Cover Magazine, Issue No. 2, 2017

Standing expectantly before a primed canvas, Mimi Chen Ting makes her first mark. She draws a line on a pristine surface with a stick of charcoal and feels the congruent responsiveness of her hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder. From this kinetic energy, Ting pushes off into a sequence of arcs, curves, geometric and biomorphic shapes, which serve as the foundation of her painting. The traces of her actions suggest such a euphoric release that it is little wonder the artist says succinctly, “I love beginnings.” Starting with that initial contact and building to more complex, ever-increasing interaction, Ting performs a painterly dance of emerging and being in the world.Having studied both art forms in tandem, Ting brings the somatic sensibility of a dancer to her painting. Since the late nineteenth century, visual artists have turned to dance and dancers as subjects, due to the expressive possibilities of the body in motion: the way in which the human figure is subsumed into a dynamic composition or formalist construction paralleled the modern artist’s daring new enterprise. Yet aside from Mondrian’s ballroom dancing, artists drew upon dance as observers, emulators, and collaborators. Rather than approximate dance, Ting’s artworks emerge from her understanding of movement, position, direction, and attitude as communication.Growing up in Hong Kong, Ting studied ballet as a young girl and loved going to the Chinese opera. This flamboyant centuries-old musical theater is known for colorful symbolic costumes, masks, and makeup of performers acting out elaborate tales with intricate gestures. Within a culture that favors repetition and refinement, Ting was equally fascinated watching similarly ritualized actions of her grandmother’s foot-washing and -binding. Settling in California’s Bay Area to attend college, Ting was liberated from her restrictive upbringing; but as she studied painting and took all the dancing classes she could, she eventually found a fecund outlet in performance art anchored in traditional practices as personally experienced. Through iteration and deliberateness, she had learned to value attentiveness and restraint.

In earlier work, her embodied awareness translated into stylized yet emphatically physical figures that convey states of mind or being. Distortions or exaggerations accentuate sensing, feeling, and knowing through the body, with emphasized hands and feet denoting a capacity for extension and for inhabiting space. After Ting stopped dancing, she let go of these surrogates and developed nonobjective imagery and a one-on-one relationship with her canvases. Guided by experimentation in collage-inspired monotypes, she created rhythmic contours, cutout-like forms, and indeterminate, fluctuating spaces. In these animated configurations, color puts everything in motion, as hues and values come forth, recede, jostle, or resist.

Before long, Ting was highlighting the contingent and unstable qualities within the interplay of forms. Rather than fanciful scenarios, she created patterns of curving, undulating planes and bands of color that appear to unfold in an ongoing cycle or continuous flow. In Chinese opera, nuances of movement are based on the principle of roundness in which angles and straight lines are avoided; this quality now permeates her graceful curvilinear paths and resulting shapes —not movement in space but movement as space. Enhancing the interrelational, Ting creates dynamic systems that seem to behave and organize according to the generative mechanisms of our physical universe and of living organisms, of big bangs and flocking birds. The viewer empathically feels expansion within the welcoming void well beyond the rectangular dimensions of the painting.

In the late 80s, Ting established a residence in Taos, New Mexico. Having lived in high-density urban areas, this town situated between the Rio Grande Rift and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains came as a revelation, one she describes as “an out-of-body experience.” At home in the sweeping landscape bathed in a piercing, ever-shifting light, she awakened to the clarity of lines and shapes within seemingly boundless vistas. Already tending toward a minimalist aesthetic, Ting increasingly distilled her compositions to be sparer and more hard-edged. Having worked with mottled backgrounds, she transitioned to unified flatness that accommodates various permutations between positive and negative space, depth and surface, in what philosopher Suzanne Langer might have called “the familiar illusive pattern of sentience.”

Lithesome and tensile lines would simply skitter across the picture plane but for the artist’s considered selection of hue and value. Color is the ingredient that adds dimensional complexity and disequilibrium, as the viewer seeks coherence and harmony from the counterbalancing tonal weights and temperatures. Laying in paint, Ting changes her original design to become more mutable and open-ended. Rather than provide fixed parameters, firm contours concentrate and intensify each color and its effect. Ting adroitly determines the proportion and acrylic pigment of each component to activate a constant visual reshuffling, such that one reading supersedes the next. Chromatic interactions create the illusion of overlay and translucence, but individual color forms can also be seen as opaque, and the swing from one to the other — along with the bounce to and from positive and negative space — engenders a feeling of perpetual motion or passage from one set of conditions to another.

To achieve this pictorial range of motion, Ting accesses her advanced understanding of theory, but the fullness of color in her paintings exceeds any exercise in situation and correlation.

Informed by her transcultural perspective, she has a captivating palette from which she devises striking combinations and arrangements, coaxing unexpected results from a frugal number of carefully prepared pigments. Ting’s astute choices come not solely from their position on the color wheel, and her inspired teaming of shades sets off the sumptuousness and vibrancy of each — as if seen for the first time. No hue plays a secondary or supportive role, which encourages the visual flux. Rather than look upon gray as neutral or drab, Ting prizes the hue for its resonance with the entire spectrum and lets it holds its own next to maroon or crimson. Often her imagination masquerades as logic, and the viewer accepts a vibrant pink seemingly produced by yellow and mint green transecting bands. Relying on the pure sensation of color rather than association, she imparts poetic feeling into her inexhaustible compositions. The reciprocity of plotting precision and delicious arbitrariness melds measure and intuition, bringing order to our entanglement with the world.

Interview: A Certain Quietness

Originally Published by Taos News Tempo Magazine March 17, 2011 pages 24, 25

Mimi Chen Ting is among artists featured in ‘Mostly Taos' show at Hulse/Warman
By Cara Fox

"Clarity" is what Mimi Chen Ting says you may notice most about her work, now on view in a vibrant group show called "Mostly Taos-Spring Show" at Hulse/ Warman Gallery, 222 Paseo del Pueblo Sur. The show runs through April 30 and includes work by Petro Hul, William Stewart, David Zimmerman, Michio Takayama, Beatrice Mandelman and Charles Strong. Three of Ting's paintings, "Refractions," "Divertimento 2" and "Divertimento 4" greet gallery-goers in a long, narrow room up front at Hulse/ Warman, paired with two metalframed works by Brian Coffin. The effect of this combination is something like precision versus precision –two distinct paths.

Originally from China, Ting and her husband came to Taos by way of California, where they still spend some months during the year in Sausalito. Escaping the frenetic energy of the West Coast, Ting considers Taos her "storm shelter."

Newcomers to her work will most likely be struck by its soothing smoothness. "There is a certain quietness about my work," Ting said. Staying true is also noticeable in her paintings. "I don't think of myself as a veering person," said Ting. "I put one foot in front of the other. My work now is where I am supposed to be," she said.

Jerry Warman of Hulse/Warman Gallery agrees. "We appreciate the consistency of Mimi's work –a focused concept translated on canvas. We are drawn to artists who take a concept and work it through over time." This consistency can be clearly seen in two of Ting's paintings that hang side-byside at the exhibition and feature blood vessel-like curves that wind up, across and away from the canvas. "I have a very un- Western view –I see up, down, left, right ... in positive and negative," said Ting. She cites calligraphy as a key influence on the way in which she uses space.

Of her approach to creating art, Ting writes in her blog: "My path is smoothest when I am willing to fall." Every turn promises an adventure, according to Ting, who places great emphasis on discovery, resonance and inquisitiveness in her process. "I came from a culture that discouraged one from talking too much. I'd be sent to my room for asking too many questions," offered Ting.

"I finally can ask all the questions I want now, without being sent to my room," she said. "I am already in my room."

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)