Mimi Chen Ting: Ties Unbound
March 28 – May 2, 2026
Opening reception: March 28, 5-7pm

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Mimi Chen Ting: Ties Unbound. This exhibition traces the stylistic evolution of Chinese American artist Mimi Chen Ting (1946-2022) from semi-autobiographical figuration to fluently expressive abstract painting. The artist’s reflections on her experiences as an immigrant, woman, and creative spirit remained a recurring theme as her approach shifted from the early 1990s to late 2000s. Ting visualized the conflicting obligations and enmeshments of identity, duty, and longing in the form of sinuous, intertwined cords. They evoke blood vessels or bindings, weaving throughout her paintings with equal capacity to strengthen, connect, or confine.

Ting felt a profound connection with her Chinese grandmother, whose bound feet shrunk her world as much as Ting’s audacious spirit broadened her own. In her earlier paintings, the artist explored her struggle to balance the competing forces of traditional expectations and the responsibilities of family life with her need for freedom and creative expression. Her 1999 painting Folded Woman contorts its subject’s lower body into a pinched, warped lotus position, even as a single defiant foot manages to wriggle free. Origins, 1991 depicts a fetal figure tumbling to earth from a vast primordial cosmos, cinched and tugged in opposing directions by a looped length of cord that crosses at its navel. The serene figure in Sleeping Woman, 1996 is suspended from a single rope slung around her waist, a painful pressure point that nonetheless supports her weight.