2012-12-03

MARY TING



” I grew up in suburban Long Island, the bedtime stories of my mother’s childhood in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation juxtaposed with the sounds of Lost in Space on our family’s television set in the background. 
My teenage years followed with the event of my father’s return to China, where he reunited with his family and trained PhD students in Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, colliding with the accidental death of my first boyfriend. The realization of the family purges and suicides was compounded by the later revision of history and ironic rise of some of those relatives to the Hall of Revolutionary Heroes. 
I eventually pursued my version of my father’s path, studying, working and living in Northern China, and discovering more than I intended to about the countryside and superstition. Naturally personal experiences and family history play a major role in the vantage point of an artist. 
Over time it melds into the language of the artwork and the work becomes cyclical. Paper was a starting point and primary medium due to its accessibility, ephemeral qualities, affordability, and its associations with ritual, folk culture, and ordinary life. But my interests have been to extend the field of drawing and works on paper into the realm of installation, sculpture, and film. In my studio, there has been an ongoing dialogue with other materials, an abstract narrative, and both a visceral and literary approach throughout my twenty years of working as an artist. The edges and boundaries of sanity, nuances in the body, a sense of longing, and shame are essential elements in the work. I have deliberately left a level of ambiguity in the work, the question as to whom is eating whom remains. The vehicle of the transformed, masked, or monstrous figure allows for an outpouring of expression of the other, stranger, outsider.” 
- Mary Ting
(Text: sweet-station)



Künstler: Mary Ting
gesehen bei: darksilenceinsuburbia, dean project