Mike Ting

Mike Ting is a multimedia artist based in Pōneke. The content and approaches he takes in his works are varied, including interviews with strangers, temporal performance pieces, recordings of the natural landscapes of Aotearoa, and the repurposing of historical footage. As his subject changes, so does his approach to capturing footage, but his interest in national identity and subjectivity marries his work together, creating an oeuvre that is an assemblage of ideas and forms.

Ting is a second-generation Chinese New Zealander and was born and raised in Pōneke. His family originated from the village of Sun Gai, in Guangdong, Southern China. In conversation with Satellites, Ting stated that, “I don’t personally have a lot to do with the Chinese community per se. Regarding my work and whakapapa, it’s always there, but it’s not a part of my practice that I force.”

For example, in 2015, Ting conducted the Mokopuna Island Project, a participatory artwork that addressed the history of Chinese in Aotearoa. It brought audiences on a sailing trip from central Pōneke to Mokopuna Island in the Wellington Harbour to tell the story of Kim Lee, an immigrant from China who was a market gardener and fruit shop owner. Lee was exiled to the island in 1903 under the suspicion of having leprosy, where he then lived in a cave. He resided there for nine months before he passed away. It is believed that racism towards Chinese in Aotearoa and fears around leprosy led to the death of Lee. Ting conducted a performance on Mokopuna Island in Wellington harbour, where Lee resided, laughing and crying out of sight from the audience and allowing the noise to echo between the rocks. Ting grappled with the solitude that Lee would have felt during his last months and channelled this sense of hauntedness into this live work.

In 2017, he travelled to Taipei to create Intimate Strangers, where he interviewed people residing in the city whose names were also Mike Ting, whom he found via social media. He spoke to them — sometimes one-on-one, other times through a translator — about their lives. The videos he produced as part of this social experiment capture the character of the cityscape and the people within it, with the voices of his interviewees, the translators and his own dubbed over images of this urban environment. Ting asks the subjects about a variety of subjects: from politics, to their relationships to their family members, to the socio-political state of Taiwan, but what links these conversations is the line of questioning that compares the East to the West, drawing a line between the artist's cultural background and that of his subjects. This series of work was shown at MEANWHILE in 2017.

In 2018, Ting produced The Restoration at play_station. The exhibition showed a video work that explored his interest in philosophical theories and their place in the histories of Aotearoa. Featuring two voices laid over historical footage of building sites, agriculture, laboratories, and nature (sourced from the Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision archives), the first voice is a dialogical interpretation of the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke, read by Ting. Locke’s belief that the right to own property is a natural right is entwined with histories of colonisation. The second person in this dialogue is Ting’s imagined voice of Papatūānuku. In writing this second transcript, Ting was influenced by the work of Pākehā academic John Patterson, who focuses his texts on the philosophy of Māori and Pasifika value systems. This imagined conversation between these figures explores their differing ideas of ownership and guardianship through Ting’s perspective as a researcher of philosophy.

Between 2011 and 2012, Ting spent two summers at the European Graduate School studying Philosophy. In 2024, he began studying towards his PhD in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, where he is exploring autotheory. Alongside his art practice, he has worked as a painter-decorator for 25 years.

Circuit Artist Page — Mike Ting

Mokopuna Island Project Blog

YouTube Page — Mike Ting