Dodo Jin Ming

"DoDo Jin Ming's spectacular Free Element series rips the veneer of civilization away we confront again, as we do nowhere outside the art of J. M. W. Turner, the sea as moral force, a seething cauldron of elements forever out of our control. She tosses us to and fro in a seeming tumult of spew and froth, and no small part of the allure of this work is imagining her, like Turner tied to his mast, actually making art amidst this danger and chaos. Jin Ming’s work is apocalypse now, the tempest as end of days, the vertiginous swell as a chastening reminder of forces that make our petty dramas seem puny and tangential, but that somehow inexorably echo them. She is drawn to the sea like a moth to a flame, to the place where destruction and exhilaration seem so closely intertwined, where death in life seems most overt. Jin Ming’s photographs are sometimes constructed, with one negative serving for the sea and a second for the sky, but their effect is always as much visceral as visual – she has found in the raging torrent some parallel for the churning and revelatory forces that constitute life.

Sunflowers too can seem similarly stark and extreme, almost an aberrant caricature of the processes of the plant world, overarch and oversized, too tall, too yellow, too dry. It is no surprise that an artist such as Van Gogh was also drawn to them; sunflowers are riotous and profuse, with luxuriant surfaces that also seem ready to cut you at your touch, a site of pleasure/pain very interesting to Jin Ming. By only using her negatives in her “Behind My Eyes” series she exaggerates their otherworldly quality, making them seem disorienting and bizarre. In the nature of the earth, as she did in the nature of the sea, Jin Ming uncovers a sense of mystery, strangeness, and disorientation, and a kind of power and vulnerability that can serve as a metaphor for the struggle of life in all its forms, including the human."

- James Yood

This catalogue was produced by Michael Hoppen Gallery and Laurence Miller Gallery in conjuction with the exhibition DoDo Jin Ming - Free Element / Behind My Eyes at Michael Hoppen Gallery in 2005 and Laurence Miller Gallery in 2004.