Sold Archive

Chao Ding lives in Sacramento, CA and earned his MFA from LSU.

My paintings are a diary of things that have happened around me, a preserve of evocative moments and fragments I have experienced. It is the integrity of my painterly reality that involves my emotion, thinking, and fantasy. I concentrate on revealing unusual beauties and poetic significance from those forgotten scenes in my paintings.

I look for constructive force and beauty in nature, discover internal orders. I am intrigued by the visual formalities and vibes that I encountered in casual surroundings, even a pile of trash or traffic cones made me take out the sketchbook. In my compositions, I simplify and structuralize the elements, omit the inessentials. I pursue a universal impression of my contents to achieve psychological expression.

I grew up in a single-parent family, the loneliness made me always have an emotional connection to trashed and non-functional things. When I came to the US, I started to explore the abandoned houses where I can gain an inexplicable sense of rooted. I am drawn into the odor of mystery and memories they produced. The decayed textural layers and subtle colors left by time passing are really appealing to me. They automatically create narrative possibilities, in a subtle way. The traces are the sediment of dialogue which is a new level of perfection for me. As a foreigner, these specificities transferred a kind of isolation as an echo for me to “speak with”. What is more, the Insignificant scenes like trash piles or construction areas strongly got my attention either. Through my works, I am longing to bring the beauties which people usually missed back to their sight.

In contemporary life, things are changing, and moving with super high efficiency, accompanied by less emotion remained. The connection becomes trivial, information becomes like movie trailers. It seems like everything is fleeting. On the other side, time is silent, soundless, but it always shows up in a brutal way when you realized it. During this flashy period, I would like to collect those “leftovers” that evoke empathy and memory, bring that fleetness and vanishing into eternity on my canvas.