DAMIEN H. DING:
Simple Structures
February 2 - March 16, 2024
Public reception: Friday, February 2, 5:30 – 8 pm
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Damien H. Ding’s solo exhibition, Simple Structures. The exhibition consists of five new egg tempera paintings and two large-scale sculptures and will be on view from February 2 to March 16, 2024, with an opening reception on Friday, February 2nd from 5:30 - 8 pm.
Damien H. Ding’s artistic practice draws from both history and personal memory, which are filtered through the lens of medium, form and subject. The five paintings in the exhibition are made with egg tempera, a venerable medium that was used on Egyptian sarcophagi, ancient Chinese murals, and widely adopted by Medieval and early Renaissance painters. In previous work, Ding explored how artwork ultimately fails to convey an exact, authentic and vulnerable experience to the viewer; in this body of work, he turns his focus to the untraversable space between the artist and his own recollections, utilizing images of abstracted personal memories and renderings of modernist architect, I.M. Pei.
To Ding, who spent his formative years in the tropics of Southeast Asia, memory feels like a dull translucent yellow—luminescent and warm like oppressive summer heat. Looking through this jaundiced sepia, memory is reduced to fleeting recollections of emotion. For him, the process of painting is then intended to give impulse to these recollections—it becomes an attempt to clarify and define the internal. Born in the 90s, Ding is temporally distant from the pinnacle of Modernism, yet his paintings acknowledge the movement’s impulses, which privileged purity and a stripping away of subjectivity in favor of supposed universal structures. The paintings exhibited in Simple Structures present figures reduced to geometric forms. In utilizing this formal strategy, Ding references the rigid violence of Modernism’s tactics of elimination, while simultaneously seizing the opportunity for the artist to reinvent, re-remember and re-materialize.
I.M. Pei appears prominently in two of the exhibition’s paintings. In the 1970s, after having cemented his reputation in the West, the architect was commissioned to build the Fragrant Hill Hotel in China; ironically, the structure was criticized by the Chinese for not representing Modernism in its purest form. Pei attempted to celebrate the history of his native country, yet found himself rebuked by the same public he was eager to please. His deep longing to commune with and honor his origins resulted in failure; as Pei’s memories had remained unchanged while everything else, himself included, shifted over time. The French were equally displeased with Pei. Even after draining his commission for the Louvre of cultural sentiment, instead emphasizing the logic of its form and space, he, once again, experienced rejection as Parisians criticized his metal and glass pyramid for not bearing the historical weight of the Louvre.
The works in Simple Structures collectively speak to the fallibility of memory and the ways in which human experience is shaped and reshaped by the mutable structures of experience. The two large-scale sculptures in the exhibition, which are modified versions of a structure the artist built as a teenager with a circle of friends, reenforce and anchor the exhibition’s content. Through them, Ding sets out to do what he deems impossible—to fully remember. Yet, the sculptures bear witness to the human need to nevertheless try.
The sculptures in this exhibition were fabricated in collaboration with Juan-Manuel Pinzon.
Damien H. Ding (b. 1992 Nanping, China) lives and works in New York City and Singapore. He received a BA in Art History with a minor in Asian Studies from Swarthmore College and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Private Paintings (Denny Gallery, NY), Difficult Paintings (The Anderson Gallery, Richmond, VA), Selfish Paintings (Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel). His work has been included in notable group exhibitions at Linseed Projects, Shanghai, China; Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Eugster, Belgrade, Serbia, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Schloss Goerne, Germany, Galerie Marguo, Paris, France, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA, Alexander Berggruen, NY, Denny Dimin Gallery, Hong Kong, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, Canada, and Spazio Amanita, NY, among others. His work has been written about in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Whitewall and Artsy. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with Steven Zevitas Gallery.
