Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to present Painting as Method, featuring the work of Mimi Chen Ting, Kelly Wang, and Yifan Jiang. The three Asian American artists engage in drastically different practices, but each of them employs a novel approach to painting within their work. Mimi Chen Ting’s abstract paintings contrast with the surreal, figurative works by Yifan Jiang, while Kelly Wang’s mixed media works infuse traditional Chinese ink and paper with contemporary industrial materials.
Yifan Jiang is a Canadian artist currently based in New York city. A conceptually-driven, project-based artist, she works across painting, animation, sculpture and performance. Jiang’s paintings explore her experiences growing up in a world of multiple cultures and languages. Inspired by everyday events, passages from books, or experiences from her travels, her work hones in on the banal—examining the gray intersections between the scientific, the psychological and the magical. Jiang’s ‘method’ of painting is an unorthodox one: once she visualizes a scene or subject, she first creates a digital model using 3D software, a method that allows her to explore her scene from multiple perspectives. With this as a starting point, the painting emerges as the materiality of paint negotiates with the digital image.
Further enriching her painting practice is Jiang’s animation work; it is one of these animations that underpins the collection of works in the current exhibition. Executed entirely with oil painting, One Sunday Morning is a fable-esque thought experiment exploring the limits of language and human empathy. The story begins with humanity’s sudden loss of language on one unsuspecting Sunday morning. Set in a parallel universe that is a magical realist re-rendering of our contemporary reality, the meeting of two characters from opposite sides of the world pushes these questions to the breaking point. What did humanity gain from language, and at what cost? Experiential in nature, Jiang’s videos synthesize handmade painting with hands-off digital processes, finding absurdity somewhere between the narrative and the visual.
One Sunday Morning sets the stage for the paintings in the exhibition; Thread of Thought is a self-portrait, where the artist paints herself attempting to ‘catch’ her various fleeting thoughts, depicted as gemstones in a windswept, parallel world. Fish is a nod to her animation process, with two figures in a fishing boat painted in sequence, the way they might appear in two separate cells of stop-motion animation. “These paintings are metaphysical landscapes… Night fractures with a sheen as sleep drifts in, midsummer air brushing past a wind chime, shedding music. Fishing in a strange lake with three suns and the sensation of wrangling down an idea before it blows past you.” - Yifan Jiang
Mimi Chen Ting was a painter, printmaker and performance artist based in Marin County, CA, and Taos, NM. In the 1980s and 90s her paintings focused primarily on semi-biographic figurative paintings that explored identity, womanhood, immigration, and a somatic relationship between self and landscape. As her practice progressed, figuration gave way to lyrical compositions inspired by natural forms and dreamlike wanderings. Honing her study of movement forms - from ballet to Tai Chi and modern dance to Butoh - her paintings became almost entirely based upon the measured motions of disciplined arcs.
Ting embraced the Buddhist “beginner’s mind,” approaching canvases without preconceptions. She sketched initial gestures in charcoal, balancing spontaneity with structure and often revisiting themes and variations; this exhibition features several works from a series of ten paintings called Tangles and Ties (2006-2009), which reference the many trials and complexities of life. In Tangles and Ties 6 and 8, the artist lays down a pictorial flow of her past experiences, dreams, and imaginations.
Suddenly September (1990), a dynamic landscape inspired by Taos, is characterized by earthy colors and hard-edged geometry. Never merely a visual depiction, Ting offers an immersive experience that celebrates movement, spontaneity, and the ephemeral beauty of the natural world. Likewise, Ting’s Winter Series (2012) acknowledges the seasonal calendar experienced through tight organic curves that meditate on the serene.
“I am a reductive abstract painter with stories to tell. In work as in life, I am irresistibly drawn to distillation and simplification. Most of my work springs from a restive stream of consciousness to question and relate, to stir up ripples and make waves… My methodology is to initiate, observe, wait, and respond.” - Mimi Chen Ting
Kelly Wang’s work also deals with abstraction, but her process draws as much from the long tradition of Chinese Painting as it does from her everyday life. She eschews the brush, instead employing various methods of spraying, pouring, and soaking ink and water into Xuan paper 宣紙 and Cloud Dragon paper 雲龍紙. In a surprising integration of contemporary materials, she continues her process on wood or aluminum panels by pouring layers of clear resin mixed with mineral pigments, manipulating the flow of the pigment particles to create translucent passages that recall mist, clouds, or space dust.
All the while, Wang’s deep appreciation of traditional Chinese art permeates her work, evident not only in her choice of materials, but also in the sense of depth and movement characteristic of her paintings, which lead the viewer’s eye through their layered compositions again and again, with new discoveries to be made on each visual journey. The large-scale work Cloud Dragon 17 illustrates this quality perfectly. Various edges of paper are left bare, becoming geometric lines that anchor the composition, over which wisps of white, grey and blue pigment create a constant sense of movement.
Wang debuts two new bodies of work for the exhibition: the first is a reimagination of the traditional Chinese album, an intimate book/painting format that dates back over 800 years. Housed in a custom camphor wood box, her small, porcelain-like album leaves are created by applying strips of paper coated with ink, mineral pigment, pulverized bronze and iron, to clayboard, letting them dry, and then peeling the paper off, leaving a residue of paper fibers, pigment, metal, and ink. Wang sees this residue is a metaphor for the diasporic experience, trying to piece together the disparate threads of a cultural tradition from the distant past. “The album leaves take major elements of Chinese material culture, porcelain, bronze, ink and paper, and remix them into an altered state. Each material gets to express itself in a way it never did in the past, each material gets to be reborn.” - Kelly Wang
The second body of work, “Driftwood Studies,” is a new sculptural series that continues Wang’s unique methodology of combining contemporary and pre-modern or natural materials, in this case pieces of driftwood enveloping a mass-produced wooden shelf. Both are found materials, yet they carry with them a wholly different material culture – the ‘ready-made’ shelf finds itself infiltrated by the pieces of gnarled driftwood, the type of natural object that literati artists would have used as a subject for contemplation. Together with her paintings, Wang presents works that can trace their spiritual lineage to the individualist painters of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the grandeur of Song and Yuan landscapes, while at the same time are a nuanced reflection of contemporary life.
