MRM News:
TAOS — The Millicent Rogers Museum is pleased to present A Lightness of Being: Works on paper by Mimi Chen Ting, a solo exhibition celebrating one of the most intimate and immediate dimensions of the late artist’s remarkable practice. On view from June 20 through December 20, 2026, the exhibition brings together a focused selection of works on paper and monoprints spanning more than two decades of Ting’s life and work in Taos, New Mexico—the high desert landscape that became the spiritual and creative center of her final years.
Mimi Chen Ting (1946–2022) was a Chinese-American painter, printmaker, and performance artist whose practice fused Eastern and Western aesthetics with uncommon grace. Born in Shanghai and trained in the Bay Area, she discovered Taos in 1988—an impulsive purchase of a one-room house on the mesa that would evolve into her primary studio and a lifelong source of inspiration. The ever-changing light, the uncompromising grandeur of the high desert, and the dramatic weather patterns of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains entered her work through heightened palette, sinuous contour, and an acute sensitivity to atmospheric change.
It is within this context that her monoprints—unique, unrepeatable works made through the direct application of paint or ink to a plate and transferred in a single pressing—reveal their deepest significance. Ting gravitated to the immediacy and painterly quality of the monoprint process beginning in the early 1980s and was fueled by the support of her work by the print master Joseph Zirker who became a friend. Though she maintained a painting studio in the Bay Area, Ting worked almost exclusively on her monoprints in Taos where she had set up a printing press.
As a medium, the monoprint shares everything with painting: the spontaneity of gesture, the freshness of first decisions, the risk of the unrevised mark. Each print is, by definition, one of a kind. For an artist whose guiding philosophy was rooted in the Buddhist practice of the beginner’s mind—who described her methodology as to “initiate, observe, wait, and respond” and who saw movement and ephemerality as the truest forms of expression—the monoprint was not a departure from her painting practice but its purest distillation. “Monoprints allow for the unexpected,” Ting said, “an uncertainty that fascinates me. I never know how the elements I apply are going to combine in the press and the result is unique.”
The works on view, range from the early Taos series of the 1990s through the bold abstractions of 2015. Some carry titles that read as responses to place: Winter in Taos, Mesa Vision 3, Gathering Moss. Others offer states of being: Bliss, Hope in Hand, Flight, Convergence. In all, they are landscapes of sensation rather than description—atmospheric, luminous, and charged with the kind of quiet intensity that characterized all of Ting’s work. Many of the works capture figures in distinct choreographic poses related to renowned dancers Nijinsky, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham.
The exhibition also carries a particular resonance for the Millicent Rogers. In 2003, Ting presented her National Endowment for the Arts–funded performance How to Make a Book and Eat It Too at the Millicent Rogers Museum—one of the defining events of her Taos years. This presentation of her monoprints marks a meaningful return: a more intimate, lasting encounter with work made during the same luminous chapter of her life.
“Mimi Chen Ting melds art and life like no other artist I know,” said Jason Andrew, Founding Partner of Artist Estate Studio, LLC, curator and director of the Estate of Mimi Chen Ting. “Her works on paper are among the most direct expressions of that fusion—urgent, singular, and deeply tied to the land and light of Taos that she loved so completely.”
The Estate of Mimi Chen Ting is exclusively represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.
© Estate of Mimi Chen Ting / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.