Mimi Chen Ting was a painter, printmaker, and performance artist whose life and career offer a view into the Bay Area art scene during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. A Chinese American artist who immigrated to California in 1965, Ting often interwove Eastern and Western aesthetics in her work. Ting can be understood alongside Bay Area artists such as Carlos Villa, Bernice Bing, or Ruth Asawa, as one of the Bay Area's Asian American and Pacific Islander creatives who have explored questions of personal identity and Asian diaspora, from the 1970s forward to today. Born in Shanghai in 1946, Ting spent much of her childhood in Hong Kong. She immigrated to the Bay Area in 1965 to attend San Francisco Women's College (now USF), eventually transferring to San Jose State University where she received a B.A. in studio art in 1969, followed by an M.A. in painting in 1976.
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 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 Taos Fall Arts. Her work can be found in public collections including the Harwood Art Museum, Taos.
