Mimi Ding is a painter currently living in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA in Painting from the Pratt Institute and will receive her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. She works mainly in oil, egg tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and crayons. Through the intricacies of the mediums and personal/archetypal symbols, she creates nuanced narratives that tell of tragedy and hope, powerlessness and resilience, jokes and visual puns.
The paintings I make express an optimistic view of life, but it is an optimism that is not mutually exclusive with sadness. There’s a sense of loss, loneliness, powerlessness, and even death, but also hope, beauty, love, and resilience. Pervading these serious qualities is the quality of humor, there is always an unnameable funniness about my paintings. In my work, humor is inseparable from tragedy because finding humor in tragedy is an act of hope that plays a part in defining who we are.
I use both oil and egg tempera mediums, for which I prepare my surfaces with oil ground and chalk gesso respectively. In this preparatory process, I am thinking about layering in building an image, which carries on to my painting process, in which I paint in thin layers of transparent colors. The transparency allows for the history of process to be seen, yet there is a sense of mystery as the complexity of the resulting texture makes it hard to discern how the image was painted. As the oil paint layers take a long time to dry, I start to detach from the image I wanted to create and instead let my mind wander in the days of waiting, and allow myself to accept the many possibilities of what the image could be. In this way, I can be spontaneous with painting. Given the freedom of evolution, the painting stays fresh even through time.
The imagery in my paintings comes from my own experiences, but has been condensed into motifs that appear consistently: the figure, the road, the animal, the sky, the ground, and the five elements. They construct narratives that are not specific to any time or place. The narrative is also a symbolic idea that exists across cultures and times. These symbols are personal, they closely relate to each individual because they are the basic experiences of life, so they can hold personal significances that differ from person to person. At the same time, they also hold collective significance as archetypes. This duality of personal and universal significances allows for multiple interpretations to be created by the viewers.