Mimi Chen Ting

Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022) was a Chinese-American painter, printmaker, and performance artist whose high-spirited practice fused Eastern and Western aesthetics. She 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.

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.

Mimi Chen Ting received her BA and MA from Cal State San Jose (1969, 1976) and studied dance and performance with Anna Halprin, Sherwood Chen, and Hiroko Tamano. Solo exhibitions include the forthcoming retrospective at Sonoma State University, Sonoma (2023); Norte Maar, Brooklyn; Art Beatus, Hong Kong; Vedder Price, San Francisco; The Harwood Museum of Art, Tao; Taos Fine Art Gallery, Taos; Stanford University Center for Integrated Studies, Palo Alto; Oakland Museum Collectors Gallery, Oakland; Cal State University, San Jose; Lucien Labaudt Gallery, San Francisco. Group Exhibitions include “Work by Women,” Harwood Museum of Art, Taos; “Landscape and Memory,” Sedona Art Center Gallery, Sedona; “Different Voices,” Santa Barbara Women's Center, Santa Barbara; among others. Public collections include Harwood Museum, Taos, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, among others.

Submitted by Artist Estate Studio