The sundry dimensions manifested in Mediha Ting’s paintings embody a relentless negotiation between cultural perceptions and one’s subconscious. Hidden in gentle human forms and chimerical landscapes are complex identity politics with a grounding in Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic philosophies that coalesce through the artist’s hands. Born in Belgium as a descendant of Taiwanese, Uyghur Chinese, Ting grew up in Hong Kong and was educated in both the U.S. and the U.K. Her fusion of Chinese ink and Western painting techniques occupy figurative and abstract compositions, limning a subliminal nod to globalization.

Ting’s works confront social issues and personal memories belonging to her diasporic reality; such externalization transfigures the painted surface to a multicultural macrocosm that evolves through reactions, reflections, and reformations. Ting’s earlier works demonstrate an unintentional synchronicity with the nostalgia and angst propelled by the seismic shifts in sociopolitical landscapes of the last millennium. Reconciling with her own life’s peripatetic pursuits, Ting reincarnates personal artifacts whilst simultaneously employing impasto in building out haunting anthropoid silhouettes. The anonymous figures in liminal urban voids serve as synecdoches for a communal dichotomized sentiment towards conditions of globalization. An inherently Freudian consideration of desire and guilt is prominent in Ting’s introspection of the contemporary milieu, where changes of forward progress are lived as contested phenomenons. 

 

Upon completing her education in the U.K., Ting’s return to Hong Kong in 2012 inspired an expanded oeuvre seen in the emergence of textual elements in Chinese ink juxtaposed with saturated hues reminiscent of the second generation of Abstract Expressionism. In the paintings, the physicality of ink and acrylic joins in unison, each medium gestured with abandon, channeling the daring spontaneity in Chi and the Western avant-garde. Swaths of colors bleed into the canvas akin to the soak-stains of Helen Frankenthaler— in these atmospheric color fields, black brushstrokes form staccatos of breath in the solemn manner of calligraphic techniques that had once inspired Abstract Expressionists’ material experimentations. 

 

Ting’s recent series, ‘Ray of Light,’ encompasses growing bodies of works that further explores the paradoxical psychological states through a nuanced play of textual elements. Texts incorporated as a painting motif are as historical as it is radical— an otherwise lucid subject is recontextualized with an ambiguity that pays homage and irreverence to Eastern and Western art history. From ancient Chinese calligraphic masters to the subversive innovations of Xu Bing, or media as the Big Brother of the neoliberal West to the cutting rebellion of Lorraine O’Grady, Ting acknowledges this art historical lineage as she engages with texts as a part of her formal techniques. 

 

 

The source of Ting’s texts vacillates between media clippings and ancestral letters, where the questioning of objectivity and subjectivity rings aloud. Can messages in the media be as subjective as a person’s narrative? Can an individual’s experience transcend an objective collective consciousness? This existential limbo is enhanced by spectatorial encounters with gradients of interchanging colors or stark shifts within a monochrome. Abstracted shapes are formed via modules of inked texts and clouds of tinted smoke, the words remain incomprehensible. In this absence of literal interpretations, there exists a strong call for meaning-making that tasks the viewers to complete; through which, recognizing one’s inculcated methods of interpretation. The canvases become palimpsests of subconsciousness and sociocultural perceptions.