The gouache and watercolor paintings of Ambrin Ling inhabit a space of uncertainty, exploring an incompleteness between different states of being. Her works draw from landscape, still-life, portraiture, and architecture to identify and break the boundaries in which women currently and have historically existed. The spaces are fractured, formed of translucent, overlapping color shapes, objects, and figures that are rendered in a range of finishes, from elegant line work to fully modeled forms. In the artist’s words, this emerging and fading explores “the experience of being human when humanness is not stable, fixed, or a given, as it is for many marginalized people who have been subject to displacement, objectification, and dehumanization.”
An interdisciplinary artist, Ling holds a degree from the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a MFA in interdisciplinary visual arts, poetics, and social justice from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her art has appeared in solo and group exhibitions around the United States, particularly in the Chicago area, and she has held artist-in-residence positions at the Vermont Studio Center, Hashinger Hall at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, HUB-HUB at the Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. She was a finalist for the Luminarts Visual Arts Grant in 2022 and is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award. Ling is currently a visiting assistant professor at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
Ling resides in Salem, Oregon.
Instagram: amb.rin.ling
