David Pagel on Ming Chen’s Art

"Ming Chen paints with real innocence. That’s because that’s the way she sees the world around her. And the kind of innocence Ming dwells in is nothing like the kind of innocence kids of my generation—and, even more so, subsequent generations—were brought up with. That, to be blunt, is innocence based in ignorance. And that kind of innocence stems from a pair of ideas about what life is like: 1.) that kids begin life as innocents—as trusting creatures that approach every new experience as if something good is bound to come out of it; and, 2.) that the world is a mean and nasty place, where bad things happen, 24/7, despite anyone’s—even everyone’s—best intentions. This is particularly true today, when so many people seem to be out for themselves, willing to step on others to advance their own short-sighted interests.

So, in this vision of what life is like, the only way to protect kids from having their dreams dashed is to shelter them from the world, hiding their tender sensibilities from the ugliness and suffering around them. That’s what adults have done to kids for generations, encapsulating them in fantasy bubbles, so that, for a few years of their young lives, they supposedly won’t know that things can go wrong, and can live, also supposedly, in a world free of sadness and suffering. That rarely works out. The fantasy can’t be maintained. Life intervenes. No parent is powerful enough to keep reality at bay. But that’s not the worst of it. The damage that gets done, to both kids and adults, happens the instant innocence and ignorance get linked, in theory and practice. The unholy alliance between those two very different attributes is meant to compensate for the lives adults live, which have been stripped of innocence. But that’s a bad deal. Real innocence gets squeezed out of the picture, replaced with a treacly fantasy of it, for kids, and the duty to perpetuate that fantasy, for parents. We see this in the overblown birthday parties they throw, the relentless trips to amusement parks and summer camps, and the dress up games that require wardrobes that rival those of royalty—all to get everyone to pretend that innocence is fleeting, like childhood, and incapable of holding its own in adult life, because knowledge is anathema to its existence.

Ming brings innocence, real innocence, into adulthood. Her paintings present a world in which innocence and experience intermingle. Her paintings make a space, in our minds and lives, where knowledge is not a threat to innocence because innocence is not predicated on being sheltered or buffered or protected from the world around it. Innocence, for Ming, is all about going out into the world and engaging it with the conviction that something good will come of it. Her paintings demonstrate that innocence need not be based in ignorance—in not knowing what’s out there. Her paintings reveal that innocence lives beyond childhood. They show that adults can experience the world around us as innocents, whenever we approach new experiences expecting, like a wide-eyed, fresh-faced kidlet, that something good is bound to come of it.

That is what Ming does in her paintings, hopscotching from figuration to abstraction, from Romanticism to Realism, from observation to imagination, from sentimentality to objectivity, from torn bits of paper to loose swipes of paintbrushes, from panorama to portraiture, from family members to insects, from ice cream stores to trees, from thick layers of paint to diaphanous, atmospheric expanses, from suburban streets to mountain peaks, from inflatable floaties to the heavens above, and from zoomed-in closeups to long views from airplane windows, 35,000 feet overhead. Ming invites viewers to see the world through her eyes—the eyes of an artist, to be sure, but also the eyes of a mother, the eyes of a daughter, the eyes of a wife, the eyes of a woman, the eyes of an immigrant—all in all, the eyes of a citizen of the world, with roots in China, where she was born, and in California, where she has lived most of her adult life. Most of all, Ming invites us to see the world through the eyes of an innocent: someone who has seen a lot of life and is still open to the moment—unafraid of what the present might bring because closing oneself off to it is not an option. For Ming, knowledge and experience, suffering and sadness, are not the enemies of innocence. They are elements that enrich and enliven and amplify the power of innocence—the experience of innocence—which cannot be disentangled, and which are consequential only when they make their way into the world, changing our relationships to our surroundings, and, in doing so, changing the world we live in, one moment at a time.

Ming’s eyes simultaneously focus on what is up close and what is far away. Even when her paintings zero in on the tiniest, most incidental details of everyday life, finding beauty in the way a palm tree casts its shadow across a concrete wall at dusk, or the way sunlight shimmers and flickers and flashes across the gently rippling surface of a swimming pool, they take us beyond the horizon, intimating that there is great mystery out there—and that the only chance we have of glimpsing it is if we look with real innocence: openly and eagerly and with the excitement of a child. Knowledge, by itself, is not enough. Wisdom is the partner term of the innocence that lives in Ming’s paintings. Both are there for all to see."

By David Pagel

Spring 2025

David Pagel

David Pagel is an art critic, curator, and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he has taught since 1994. His reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art issues., Flash Art, and Art in America. Recent publications include Broad Reminders: John Sonsini + David Pagel , Radius Books, 2024, Jim Shaw, Lund Humphries, 2019 and Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity, Zero+, 2018, as well as monographs on Ted Larsen (Radius Books) and Augustine Kofie (Zero+), and catalog essays on Jay DeFeo, Brenda Goodman, Gajin Fujita, and Dion Johnson. Pagel has organized more than 90 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Australia, including, most recently, “Brown Letham: Passion and Paradox (and a little night music),” and “tbd: Jay Erker, Tony Larson, John Mills, Holly Perez, Marissa Reyes, and Jenny Ziomek,” both at Claremont Graduate University.

Pagel is currently working on a book on Bret Price, to be published in 2025. He earned a B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature, with Honors and Distinction in the Humanities, from Stanford University in 1985 and an M.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1987. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Contemporary Arts Criticism in 1990, a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne in 2002, and a Thousand People Program Fellowship in Tianjin, China in 2018. A self-taught diorama builder and an avid cyclist, Pagel is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.

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