It's Going to Rain, 2025, dimension variable
motors, umbrella, brooms, fans, leaves
(video documentation) https://www.instagram.com/p/DP3xIkAEVAl/
Psycho Rain, 2025, 37x80 1/3 inches
watercolor and acrylic on print
Before a storm comes,
swirling vortices of air,
bring leaves floating and in motion.
Brooms, fans, umbrellas,
gathering, murmuring.
It’s a party with flickering lights.
Yes, it‘s going to rain.
John Cage asked, “When a truck passes by a music school or a factory, which is more musical?”Tielin Ding approaches this exhibition with a similar spirit, pondering the buildup of energy before a storm and the tension that precedes a natural eruption. When does the storm truly begin? The umbrella, a common motif in this exhibition,
symbolizes protection and faith. The color yellow recurs throughout his practice. He considers the yellow lines on roads, suggesting a sense of both continuation and separation. By focusing on the friction and pulse between things and their environments, It’s Going to Rain presents a look at the moments between safety and uncertainty, logic and whimsy.
This is the only collaborational work in these work samples where I collaborated with ikebana artist Kristina Bajunaishvili. Both of us enjoy nature and the temporality of things/scenes. When we decided to meet to install the work, the improvisational part of the installation process brings the work more aliveness. I consider collaboration as a process of expanding our vision, stimulation and inspiration. I also appreciate, in Fluxus Movement, designers, artists，choreographers, musicians and composers collaborate together to create and invent.
sometimes, I am thinking what kind of energy would bring the same level of goodness between an artist’s drawing/painting and their installation/sculpture.
I admire someone who can freely explore different kind of mediums but you can feel the interconnected energy among their works.
When I think of a lit candle in precariousness, I am thinking about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia(1983) where the leading character, the deranged man carrying a burning candle through the waters of pool to heal himself, "It is the unprotected fire, the flickering flame, the very essence of things", Tarkovsky said in an interview.
In these installations, brooms are vehicles of transportation. They are not the “Kiki’s Delivery Service” kind of broom, but they still transport. They transport candles, candles with lit flames. These two renderings are generated from the previous installation “(B)roomful of, 2023”.
Traffic stick is a found object used in the urban environment to mark and signify the boundary of where to go and where not to go. Yellow powder is where I was thinking of it as the trace left by the walking/wandering eperience of the traffic stick. The trace is non-linear which is very different from the yellow straight line we might see in interior space. The installation is site-specific and improvisational, it is a walking experience, a meandering trail and perhaps a piece of music.
https://tielinding.com/Grass-Mountain-and-Traffic-Cone-1
Followed by the gesture of gravitational shift with branches, I am intrigued by the process of falling down and spreading out when the branches were hit against the wall. The image of the installation as a whole is like a decaying mountain with a marked trail inside. What was left on the floor are some small parts of the branches, some are powders, some are ashes. I got reminded of what a great poet Juyi Bai from Tang Dynasty wrote, “Lush, lush grass on the plain; Once every year it sears and grows. The wildfire tries to destroy it in vain; When the verna breeze blows, it comes to life again.”
Application of “Mapping” and “Walking” gives me more opportunity to think about trail-blazing, way-finding, mark-making and how nonverbal trail language leads me to hear the sound of rustle in natural environment.
Guided by my practice of drifting and encounters with trail markers, I became interested in how the sign of a trail marker guides me to open up a new world of signs and language, both physically and virtually, across urban and natural spaces.Intrigued by the tension among form, color and sound in this project, I am thinking about a trail with directional markers as a metaphor of the psycholinguistic structure of “entry-body-exit” in our daily life.
https://tielinding.com/A-Walk-with-Blaze
John Cage asked in 1958 "when a truck is passing by a music school or a factory, which is more musical"? I have been thinking about the moving truck signifying as a wandering heart, a risking mind and an international citizen who is always thinking of where to go and which direction to go.
A truck is a carrier, a vehicle of transportation and transformation, with the truck's aluminum surface reflecting sunrise, sunset, traffic lights and car lights while the wheels are always in motion. Along the journey, the truck keeps changing the color and light of its surface.
In this solo presentation, the artist is sharing a site of construc(k)tion with photo-based installation including a design element of yellow, which is a color that has been penetrating through in his previous practices, suggesting a sense of both continuation and separation, just like the yellow line in the middle of the road.
The truck is on stage, under spotlight. The truck printed in body-scale is the first image you will see when you enter the gallery space. Next to the butt of the truck, there is a ‘TURNTABLE’ lying there in stillness. Floating above the yellow lines painted unevenly with latex paint, there is a white shirt insisting installing on the wall with yellow pushpins. It writes ‘EASTURN’ and ‘WESTURN’ on the back of the shirt paired with the image of sunset and sunrise.
In this presentation, I hope the works surrounding ‘The Truck’ also carry the energy/atmosphere of ‘The Truck’, every pigment/pixel of it. The surrounding works include a drawing titled as ‘wind-shield wiper inside the mind’ and a mixed-media work ‘keys are moving, they generate moving keys’, six other photographs including urbanscape with yellow traffic lights, spreading gravels and sand in the parking lot, a cone-shape cloud floating above an abandoned concrete mixer next to a blurrrry ferrrrry, trespassing coneflower and ‘trees, road-lights and water-fall’.
If to make a floating frame, I think I will give it to ‘The TURNTABLE’ which brings it more volume to activate/vibrate the surfaces mapped in this space, from the butt of ‘The Truck’. I looked up the word ‘TURNTABLE’ in the dictionary, it shows up as following:
a: a rotating platform that carries a phonograph record
b: a platform with a track for turning wheeled vehicles (such as locomotives)
C: LAZY SUSAN common in Chinese restaurant
https://tielinding.com/The-Sound-truck-of-1
untitled, archival pigment print, 2021
You can’t find the same leaf two times, as well as the keys, except the key owners insist on having copies of keys. I am interested in the collectiveness of the unique ones, where they interact, play and make music together.
Another Night Screwdriver Rested on the Sponge, 50.3x122cm, 2025
oil and acrylic on print
sponge, porous, soft, yellowish; screwdriver, hard, sharp, a good shape. Sponge on screwdriver,
it's a form of rest, a state of being, relaxed, loose, perhaps a sense of freedom.
repetition, mark-making, revisiting...
https://tielinding.com/Site-specific-Temporal-Installation
Under the practice of aimless wandering in my daily life, I am interested in capturing and collecting found objects and materials in different size, shape, weight and volume, posing and composing them under different outdoor environments. In these three photographs, which I also consider as documentations of site specific temporal installation, stones, matches and flags are trying to find their own unique forms, compositions and states of being. I produced these three works at Abbott Watts Residency in Monson, Maine, special thanks to Todd Watts for selecting
these three works.
digital projection of "Matches of Matches" in Tibet, 2025
Baguette, 30x20inches, 2025 charcocal on print
