Painting (MA)
Ming Ying
Ming Ying(b.1995) is a London based artist. Her works are almost exclusively in oil paint.
In recent years her works have got and been shortlisted for a number of prestigious prizes including: Chadwell Award(2020); First prize of ‘Effect Edge’ International Juried Exhibition(2019); Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize (2018); Ashurst Emerging artist prize (2018); Winner of Khojaly Peace Prize for Art(2017) and others.
Her works have been selected for a number of important shows including:‘Effect Edge’ in Katonah Museum of Art in New York (2019), ‘Prism’ in Republic of Korea Parliament in Seoul (2019), ‘Dialogue—London’ in Chinese Embassy in London (2017) and so on. Some of her works were collected by European Azerbaijan Society, University of the Arts London and published by Aesthetic Magazine, contemporary art curator magazine, ‘European Times’ and other press.
The paintings are done to show a kind of collision which suggests that people’s cognition quite often goes counter to their reality. In the everyday world, people often find themselves dazed and in a contradiction between reality and unreality. For example, when their spiritual worlds are different from or in conflict with the world that they live in. As a painter, I feel pushed to expose the phenomenon and try to express it through image making.
In each of my paintings, I present a view in which such a contradiction can clearly be felt by looking at the surfaces, colors and lines. Different visual surfaces in different areas work to express the collisions between reality and unreality. Exaggerated lines and brush strokes are applied with thick paint to depict real and figurative zones while an abstract pattern is built with flat paint to embody a kind of imagined fictional zone, both of which are either broken into or slightly touching each other. Each painting is comprised of two halves: one, a realistic expression; the other, an unreal one. In my works, one can find a combination of opposites: impasto paint and flat paint, exaggerated and natural, dynamic and static. Therefore, out of the real scenes in the paintings comes to the audiences a sense of unreality.
I am not aiming to provide an answer to the contradiction but would like to reveal it to the viewers and leave it open for a discussion. More important, the collision as such is a good means of functioning to stimulate people`s minds to think deeper, for people’s minds are full of imagination, illusion and fiction. By combining different layers and contrasting surfaces, I intertwine something imagined with that experienced in life. And I employ a semi-figurative way to create an atmosphere which is characterized by realistic and fictional elements. Thus, the works appear with a dream-like quality, which, I expect, can work to trigger the imagination and resonance of the viewers.
