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For a long time, I did not know why I should continue making art.

 

On three occasions, large bodies of my work were destroyed in accidents. To me, this meant more than the disappearance of physical objects. Each time I received such news, I felt as though a period of my life had been erased from reality along with them. If the works could not remain, what did making them mean? I found myself unable to move beyond this question.

 

The loss of a loved one brought me back to these questions. After my grandfather died, I 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 me to that era had broken. Gradually, however, I 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, I stitch wire mesh by hand using metal wire, one stitch at a time. I learned this stitching motion from my grandmother, who taught me needlework and how to sew quilts when I was a child. When this motion reappeared, I realised that things which had never been recorded, preserved or retained might already have entered the body and become part of me.

 

Traces of the environment in which I 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 my 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 my habits, and what is difficult to put into words increasingly occupy my attention. Through this exhibition, I look back at the traces that family, an era, my surroundings and experiences have left in me, and at how these traces continue to shape who I am today.

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Fang Ting Ting is an artist, curator, and founder of the Asian Academy of Arts. She began studying painting in childhood, starting with Chinese ink painting, and later received training in oil painting, watercolour, sculpture, printmaking, photography, arts administration, art history, and art theory in China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Over more than twenty years, her engagement with different materials and approaches has shaped an artistic practice that moves across multiple media.

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Her work is not confined to a fixed material or form; she selects the medium and method of making in response to the questions addressed by each work. Her current practice encompasses painting, installation, photography, moving image, and spatial work. She is interested in how the physical handling of materials brings them into relation with the body, time, and personal experience, and how experiences that have passed continue to shape the present.

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Fang’s curatorial practice and her artistic practice have developed in parallel. She initiated A Manifesto, an international exhibition series dedicated to increasing visibility and creating opportunities for emerging and underrepresented artists, while encouraging cross-cultural dialogue and freedom of artistic expression. Over the past five years, her curatorial and cultural work has included exhibitions, forums, and collaborative projects in Paris, Venice, London, Riyadh, and Hong Kong.

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