Ting Teal

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Through constant inquiry, research has become my artistic medium. This is underlined by a constant effort to ground my identity within the site-specific context of my work. Each project becomes a parafictional looking-glass that allows me to play with forgotten or disregarded ideas and present them to viewers within a site discrete from reality, where real-world logistics and machinations do not apply and moments of reprieve are made possible. Eschewing fidelity towards a particular material, the fluid nature of my concerns has allowed an output of drastically different works that all aim to create an immersive, uncanny and humorous experience for the viewer. Past work has focused on the autobiographical relationship between the Art Institution and I, including the (separation) anxiety it spawns. I have a consistent interest in appropriating narrative structures from popular television and film as a vehicle for my own ideas, and recurring themes include self-parody, the unnoticed and my ever-changing interests (e.g. competitive cooking shows, death and the internet, circus arts, etcetera). In the background of my practice, there are currently two research projects that I have worked on intermittently for several years. One is an ongoing passion project about Iris Chang, an Asian-American journalist, and Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary. Born eighty years apart, the two are connected through their suicides and by both being outsider heroes of the WWII Nanking...

Artwork