Ambrin Ling

My work is concerned with drawing as an experience in perception through which we renew our relationships with the peripheral, the transient, and the overlooked.  Rather than viewing drawing purely as graphite on paper, I am concerned with drawing as analogous to the touch and trace, both materially and conceptually.  Thus, my wet-media works, including paper sculptures formed during their wet states, loosely reference facets of architecture and domestic objects.  Forms and images vacillate between the abstracted and familiar; between bleeding pigment and opaque brushwork; and between precise, objective edges and undulating, tactile material.

My work in part stems from my experiences as a third-generation mixed Pakistani, Chinese, and Scottish American immigrant, as well as a brown woman.  I am fascinated by what it means to migrate, to have shifting and multiple worldviews, and to resist the framing mechanisms of external structures.  Drawing’s potential lies in its ability to create images that are at once evocative of the familiar at the same time that they resist total perceptual resolution.  My drawing is a verb: an action that employs translucent washes, unbecoming forms, and negative space to allude to possible futures and infinite changeability in our lived structures and mundane scenes.

A self-described practitioner in a visual language of stains and traces, Ambrin Ling explores ideas of absence, perception, and the relationship between space and the body via cast paper sculpture, watercolor painting, and grass-stain pigmentation.   She completed her undergraduate education at Carleton College (MN) and her graduate education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL).  Her hybrid education, spanning cultural psychology, sociology, literature, and art has contributed to her drive to push the boundaries of drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation art as means to question myopic, exclusionary ways of seeing and being in the world.  Her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, and her honors include the Elizabeth Greenshield’s Foundation Fellowship and Ragdale Residency.  Over the 2018-2019 year, she will practice as an Artist-in-Residence through the Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, SC.