From 20th–23rd October, Luminous Flesh: Objects Between Presence and Absence transformed Purist Gallery in London into a site for light experimentation. In her solo exhibition, Chun Ding used cyanotype and digital collage to build a visual language between light and body — a dialogue of exposure, imprint, and touch. Comprising nine works, the show explored the tension between manifestation and disappearance, where images no longer contain representation but dissolve into moments of mutual permeability between perception and matter.
Ding’s practice consistently focuses on the concept of ‘surface’: she uses fabric, photosensitive emulsion, and digital layering to treat the skin of images as an interface between touch and memory. In her hands, cyanotype is reactivated, no longer a technical symbol of classical photography, but a ‘time-delayed record’ —sunlight, chemistry, and time conspire within it, depositing traces of plants, bodies, and machines within the same layer of matter. Her work seems less about the ‘making’ of images and more akin to a meditation on ‘leaving.’
The exhibition highlights the organic nature of light, where it lingers, permeates, and even transforms into texture within matter. Chun Ding makes the tactile quality of light a language: the presence of folds, seams, and weaves on the surface of the works renders viewing a bodily process, allowing the ‘skin of the image’ to become a breathing interface for emotion and memory.
In her exhibition, Chun Ding’s creases remain on the fabric, or the forms are faintly visible within the blue layers; everything constantly reminds the viewer that at the intersection of light and time, existence is an unstable state. The visual world constructed by Chun Ding is not a binary of ‘existence’ or ‘absence,’ but a fluid field existing between the two.
Through the rebuilding of the interaction between light, body, and technology, video is transformed into a form of sensory reflection. In the exhibition, Chun Ding explores the relationship between light, nature and body.
All images Installation View, at the Purist Gallery, 2025 Courtesy the artist
