Fang Ting Ting: From Here, What Remains Solo Exhibition

For a long time, Fang Ting Ting was uncertain why she should continue making art. On three occasions, large bodies of her work were destroyed in accidents. To her, this meant more than the disappearance of physical objects. Each time she received such news, she felt as though a period of her life had been erased from reality along with them. If the works could not remain, what did making them mean? She found herself unable to move beyond this question. The loss of a loved one brought her back to these questions. After her grandfather died, she felt strongly for the first time that when a person disappears, the era that existed alongside them seems to recede as well. A thread connecting her to that era had broken. Gradually, however, she began to see that even when an era ends and a person leaves, what they leave behind continues to exist in other forms, even in the smallest gestures. In making these works, she stitches wire mesh by hand using metal wire, one stitch at a time. She learned this stitching motion from her grandmother, who taught her needlework and how to sew quilts when she was a child. When this motion reappeared, she realised that things which had never been recorded, preserved or retained might already have entered the body and become part of her. Traces of the environment in which she grew up also recur throughout this exhibition. Wire mesh is the material used in most of the works. It comes from a very ordinary visual experience: the window screens at home. Their regular grids both protect and obstruct; they form boundaries and suggest an invisible order. For a generation raised in one-child families in China during the 1990s, this experience may not feel entirely unfamiliar: family expectations, protection, scrutiny and restriction often occur together. From birth, a person enters countless relationships and rules that are already in place. Another work uses mirrors to explore how this scrutiny and these relationships might extend further. Nearly two hundred small mirrors form lines of sight that connect yet remain separated by gaps, suggesting views from society, from family and from oneself. The traces of assembly remain visible, and the reflected image remains whole. This whole, composed of many parts, echoes her understanding of the self: these influences from the past make up the self as it is today. What has disappeared yet continues to have an effect, those who have left yet remain in her habits, and what is difficult to put into words increasingly occupy her attention. Through this exhibition, she looks back at the traces that family, an era, her surroundings and experiences have left in her, and at how these traces continue to shape who she is today.