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)