CHAO DING
Perceptual Artist.
MFA at LSU
Work and live in San Jose, CA
Can belonging survive after the disappearance of care? This question lies at the center of my practice. Through painting, I investigate how memory shapes our understanding of home, identity, and attachment, asking whether the emotional traces of care can continue to exist after the people, places, and relationships that once sustained them have disappeared.
Growing up with a profound sense of displacement and later immigration experience, I came to understand belonging not as a fixed place, but as a fragile psychological condition. I am drawn to images that carry the quiet residues of human presence, where absence is never empty but filled with memories, longing, and the possibility of return.
Painting becomes a space where fractured relationships, fragmented memories, and displaced identities can be temporarily held together. Rather than reconstructing the past, my work asks how memory continues to inhabit us, and whether belonging can persist even after the structures that once made us feel at home have been lost.