Space As Cornucopia

Taos Fine Art Gallery features the work of Mimi Chen Ting and Richard Nichols
By J. Pointer
May 1993

From May 29 through June 12, Taos Fine Art Gallery is featuring the work of Mimi Chen Ting and Richard Nichols. Ting is a contemporary artist working in monotypes and acrylic on canvas. Nichols' oils and charcoals are representational. But despite the contrast in styles, these artists share interests and enthusiasms, and the unexpected interplay between new and traditional expression makes this exhibit one of the most interesting events of the Spring Arts season.

Gallery co-director Chuck Perna says, "Ting and Nichols share an exuberance about art and life, and each artist's work is characterized by harmony. Presented together, their art is richly complimentary. We like to think of this show as a beautiful surprise."

Photo by P.D. Quick

The art of Mimi Chen Ting delineates the poetic space between life's dualities-birth/death, separation/ unity, memory/invention. There's a luminous intelligence at work here, as comfortable with big themes as it is delighted by small, playful moments. Best yet, it's accessible magic. We need no interest in philosophy to appreciate the handsome, colorful geometry of these monotypes and acrylics on canvas. "It's how I talk to myself," Ting laughs. As simple as that.

"It's all process. I love to explore potentials and promises and the language of my tools." 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.

When Ting says, "It's almost what is not visible that's most important," she acknowledges the mystery of her vast terrain and answers Carl Jung's call for "the union of opposites through the middle path, that most funda­mental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao." The artist's "mental monologue," as she calls it, assimilates East (space as possibility) and West (precision perspective).

Born in Shanghai, China, Ting came to the U.S. to study sociology and literature in 1965. In 1976, she received her M.A. in art from San Jose State University. She now maintains a studio in Taos, a place, she says, that returned "a sparkle" to her eyes.

The variety of Ting's cultural experience enhances the texture of her modernist expression. Western humanities, of course, was forever altered by exposure to the art and thought of the Orient and by oddly compatible theories of relativity. Ting's artistic sensi­bility charts the evolution in unique order. She cites the influence of the 15th century Italian artist Piero della Francesca, whose paintings were characterized by a scientific perspective and systematic simpli­fications of natural forms.

Ting says, "Some of my earliest awareness of aesthetics was through Buddhist temple sculp­tures, Beijing opera style of music and performance, a culture that defines its fates through stark scripts and rituals as well as opulent decorations and ceremonies. These lessons were often hard to reconcile with my concept of expression. Somehow when I first saw Piero's works, I felt I understood that there was a way to absorb and filter it all. I learned to combine figuration and abstraction in the literal sense, how to describe time through the use of space."

Mimi Chen Ting, Habitat, acrylic on canvas (three panels), 54 by 87 inches.

Figure and landscape abstraction are the foundations of her art. "They help me tell stories," she says, "and ask questions. Through these, I gain an understanding of relationships and commonalities. I'm dealing with universal images, images fundamental to humanity."

Her triptych Habitat embodies a characteristic fascina­tion with geometry and its potential to render myth. Female figure in repose, architectural allusions, mountains sculpted in mist. A full moon illuminates "empty" space. Pale blue ladder contrasts in angle and value to the red contours of peaks and valleys. Chinese calligraphy appears in two of the panels. "One within the mountain," Ting translates. "The right symbol is 'persona,' the center one represents mountain, and the left pictograph means 'enter.' It's multi-leveled. Entry, submission, surrender." Despite its theatrical composition, and the political weight of the word submission, the overall effect of this painting is serene.

"In Habitat, I was conscious of embracing my roots," she says. "As the arch of that bridge becomes broader, my reach becomes deeper and the embrace stronger in time." As Ting speaks, she expands, modifies, poeticizes. One can feel the process that organizes her art, the ripple effect of an answer to a single keen question. The curiosity that motivates her work appears as limitless and as joyful as a child's.

Mimi Chen Ting, Inbound, monotype on arches, 22 by 18 inches.

''I'm filled with wonder about nature, and I am intrigued by all identities and perceptions. I love quirks and deviations. My father said that my skull, as an infant, didn't fuse, which means, he said, my mind will always be open."

The serendipity of printmaking accommodates her wit, vigor, and literary proclivities. Her monotype Inbound, for example, is a splendid tale of fragility and tenacity.

Her big acrylic canvasses are remarkable for the flatness of effect which has been compared to that of Matisse. She resembles her "second muse" in other ways, too: color and drama. As Matisse turned an everyday parlor into a stage, Ting makes theatre of ordinary dreams and spontaneous associations. (One critic wrote, "Ting's abstractions are apparitions from the collective unconscious.") It is her tracking of the tension, its unpredictable rhythm, that dramatizes the ultimate refinement of her canvasses. The viewer is safely seated in the eye of a hurricane, and in her best work, Ting, like Matisse, uncovers the grandeur in tranquility.

“I’m painting to find my voice. Sometimes I say that I want it to be a whisper heard loud and clear. And though is it, as I’m working, a communication with myself, the greatest reqard is in knowing it has become a dialogue with the viewer.”

Mimi Chen Ting’s work is widely collected, appearing in public, corporate, and private collections around the world.

Obituary: Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022)

Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022), a Chinese-American painter, printmaker, and performance artist whose high-spirited practice fused Eastern and Western aesthetics, has died on March 6. The cause was complications due to a long battle with cancer.

She was 75 and was active in the artist communities of the Bay Area of San Francisco, CA, and Taos, NM.

An intense, unpretentious woman with a soft voice and fierce spirit, Ms. Ting was born in Shanghai, China, at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and during the communist takeover of the mainland. As a teenager her father swept floors for the industrialists Song Brothers to support his own family. By the time of Ms. Ting’s birth, he had worked his way up to Bank manager. Her mother was a concubine introduced to her father—16 years her senior when she was just 13. Raised in what Ms. Ting considered feudalistic China, she grew up in a compound with a shared courtyard where she played with other children and waited for the rice popper man to pass by. Memories of her maternal grandmother’s bound feet made a lasting impression–the imagery of which entered into many of her early figurative paintings.

As Ms. Ting’s father rose through the ranks of the banking industry, he relocated the family to Hong Kong. There Ms. Ting spent her childhood attending a convent school, where she was regularly charged by the nuns to make festive cards and headed the annual Christmas decorating. As she began to excel in ballet, her mother withdrew her from studying for fear that she would become “too muscular.” Ms. Ting rebelled, defiantly refusing to attend her piano lessons. This introduction to dance made a lasting impression, later informing her foray into contemporary performance art.

In middle school, she studied calligraphy. “Everybody had to take calligraphy,” she said. “I never really understood it until I was much older.” Attending Buddhist temples with her grandmother exposed her to rich colors, ancient wisdom, and reliquary forms, and trips with her father to see the Beijing Opera introduced her to theatrical costumes and dramatic movements. These events constituted her early influences, “without really realizing that’s what it was.”

In 1965, and with the contingency that she enroll in an all-girl’s Catholic school, Ms. Ting left Hong Kong for San Francisco to attend the San Francisco College of Women (now part of the University of San Francisco). There she pursued dual degrees in sociology and English literature. Though conditioned to perceive art as an indulgence, she signed up for an extra class every semester to do art. “It made me so happy to do it, to draw and paint.”

Realizing that “being a social worker was very different from just having good intentions,” Ms. Ting  switched her major during her third year at college to art and transferred to California State University in San Jose (now known as San Jose State University). There, she was introduced to the art of Giotto and Piero Della Francesca. “I liked the simplified forms, the flatness against each other. The dynamics between the forms,” she reflected. 

At San Jose State, one instructor, Eric Oback, made a powerful impression on Ms. Ting. He urged her to find her own way of painting, and most importantly to “let the how follow the what.”

During these years, and being so close to Berkeley, Ms. Ting participated in the free speech movement, countless Vietnam protests, and attended the last rally for Robert Kennedy before his assassination in 1968. She supported herself working at a liquor store and as a hostess at a local restaurant. Ms. Ting received her BA in Art from San Jose State University in 1969, and she immediately began pursuing a graduate degree, 

This was a challenging time for Ms.Ting as she tried to strike the balance between her personal and professional life. Shortly after graduating, she married her college boyfriend,Andrew Ting in 1969. Their first child, Cheryl, was born in 1970, and their second child, Clarence, was born in 1972.

As she found her footing as a wife and mother, Ms. Ting remained dogged in pursuit of her art. Her first solo exhibition took place at Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco in 1970. The show consisted of paintings on paper, some made while “working in the corner of my bedroom lined with newspaper, while my infant daughter slept and played among pillows in our bed,” she recalled. The work on view was inspired by a trip to the Grand Canyon, where she harnessed the shapes and the sense of land, “but the palette was all my own.” This debut earned her an encouraging review by senior art critic Thomas Albright in the San Francisco Chronicle. Landscape, and moreover, the psychological connection to it, would forever be a recurring theme in her work. 

Like many women of her generation, gaining a footing in the gallery scene was a constant struggle. She told the story of approaching Smith-Andersen Gallery in Palo Alto early in her career, to show her work. “That was where Sam Francis was showing and I thought I’d really like to show with him. I didn't know there were several ways to approach a gallery,” she recalled. “I remember having my baby on one hip, a piece of work in my other arm and a copy of my review in hand as I walked into the gallery. I just walked in thinking, ‘Oh well, they'll be so impressed.’” They told her to come back in a few years; she did.

“Unfinished Woman,” 1986, Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 41 in (144.8 x 1045 cm)

“Devotion,” 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 53 x 48 in (134.6 x 122 cm)

In the years that followed, balancing her responsibilities as a mother, Ms. Ting maintained time in the studio becoming an accomplished printmaker. She completed her MA in painting in 1976 and began teaching drawing and design at the college level.

As her children were of an age where their needs made it difficult to find time for focused studio work, she returned to the study of dance—gravitating to modern techniques but embracing the pace and philosophy of Butoh. Ms. Ting explored performance work integrating both static and kinetic elements. In 1981, Ms. Ting became one of four founding members of a modern dance company often performing in abandoned sites across the Bay Area. “I love the kinesthetic,” she said, “I love feeling movement through my body. And I find that a very natural form of expression for me.” Ms. Ting’s paintings from his period are primarily figurative, often biographical in their referencing of ancestral identity within a gestural-dreamlike space.  

Beginning what she called her “second migratory arc,” in 1988, Ms. Ting impulsively purchased a one-room house on the mesa in Taos, New Mexico. The desire to see the Santa Fe Opera was the initial impetus for the visit to New Mexico. Initially conceived as a private retreat, Taos evolved into a major workspace for expanded stays. There, she found continuous inspiration from the ever-changing vistas, uncompromising grandeur, and spectacular weather patterns of the high desert. These forces and images are invoked in her work through her choice of palette, heightened contrasts, and sinuous contours. It was during one of her drives back from Taos that she would take a four-day movement workshop from the legendary choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin. Sherwood Chen and Hiroko Tamano were other dance artists with whom Ms. Ting had studied. Movement, much like her approach to painting, was an embrace of the ephemeral. “Always a response to the moment,” she said.

From 2000, Ms. Ting divided her time between the studio in Taos and Marin County. The Bay Area provided a connection to family—including her children and grandchildren in Oakland—and a travel base from which she could fly to Hong Kong to visit her mother, which she did twice a year until her passing.

While her career is book-ended by an interest in the expressive possibilities of abstraction, Ms. Ting’s paintings from the 1980s, 90s and early aughts focused primarily on figurative work that explored notions of womanhood, immigration, and a somatic relationship between landscape and place. Embracing the processes of Abstract Expressionism as well as the Buddhist practice of the beginner’s mind, Ms. Ting regularly approached her canvases without any preconceived ideas, preferring to allow the direct application of paint and the subconscious gesture to dictate her compositions. She often worked thematically and in series. 

“I am like an irrepressible child, capable of boundless possibilities, when I enter my studio. I thrill at the process of making marks and I relish the meandering that my medium proffers,” she said.

"The work of Mimi Chen Ting melds art and life like no other artist I know,” explains curator Jason Andrew, who had the honor of working with Ms. Tiing over the course of her final year, “Though working strictly within an abstract vein, I see a keen and perceptive understanding of beauty and its translation through a very personal and emotional language. There is so much more to see and learn through her art and performances."

Ms. Ting held teaching positions at San Jose Metropolitan Adult Education, San Jose State University, San Jose City College, University of California at Berkeley Extension, and more recently at Taos Institute of Art. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 2003 for her performance “How to Make a Book and Eat It Too” at the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM. In 2012, she was awarded the Agnes Martin Award for Abstract Painting and Drawing from Fall Arts, based in Taos, in 2012.

Her work can be found in public collections including the Harwood Art Museum, Taos.

Aside from being a noted artist, Ms. Ting was a self-described “opera, NPR and chamber music addict.” She loved gardening and science fiction, practiced yoga and tai chi, and thought hard about the world’s most pressing geopolitical and environmental concerns. She is survived by her husband, two children, and four grandchildren.

“There are no fixed horizons,” Ms. Ting said, and so her spirit lives on through her art.