15 July – 15 October 2008
Mediha Ting is a London based painter whose work explores notions of place and the artist’s experience as a ‘modern day nomad’. For her First Step exhibition at Chinese Arts Centre, Ting presents Fragmented London, a vibrant series of work which reflect the diversity of her current locale interweaved with the collected memories she has experienced on her many travels.
Fragmented London is a body of work comprising twelve multi-layered paintings which are installed to create a patchwork of expressions of the city. The works are created through the image-making process of overlapping transparent images. Parts of the images are lost with the new form emerging as revealing and concealing at the same time. Ting links this process of breaking the surface of the painting with the construction and recollection of memory, existing in a fragmented yet enduring form.
Newspapers, magazines and scraps of paper found in daily life as well as captured images are mixed into the paintings. Boundaries start to dissolve as memories of past experience merge and connect in a fragmented but separately identifiable way, creating a densely layered expression of place.
The search for cultural identity, displacement, rootless-ness, attachment, cultural boundaries and how people react to with their environment are an important part of Ting’s artistic explorations of a place. Her interest stems from her own background having moved from her birthplace in Belgium to Hong Kong at the age of two before moving to the UK then the USA. Her paintings reflect her myriad experiences and her sensitivity towards the places she explores.
