Rosie Ding
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Rosie Ding's work leans into what’s raw, tangled, unresolved — not to dramatize it but to make space for what can’t always be said out loud. Working across sculpture, video, drawing and performance, she keeps circling back to the body. Not as image, but as tension, as memory, as site of pain and repair. Fingers become a kind of shorthand, standing in for control, vulnerability, and everything in between. There’s theory in the background, but emotion drives the process. What you see in her work often comes after the fact, after rupture, after reflection, after the layers have shifted into something new.
Q: What pulls you back to the body again and again?
A: The body, in my work, often exists in a state of tension, entanglement, and gore — an honest reflection of my own fraught relationship with it. I’ve never really known the feeling of bodily unity or belonging. Control feels foreign. Satisfaction, even more so. I’ve dealt with a fair share of physical and psychological pain — three consecutive surgeries in the past year, for instance, directly informed my most recent works. Through distortion, exaggeration, and disjointed anatomies, my practice becomes a way of translating these embodied and psychic struggles into form.
Q: Fingers show up a lot in your work. What’s in that detail that you keep coming back to?
A: Fingers hold a strange significance in my practice — both materially and metaphorically. I started biting my nails as a coping mechanism for anxiety. My nail beds are now permanently damaged, and with that came a deep-rooted sense of shame. Acrylic nails became the antidote: a hyper-feminine symbol of control, sensuality, and composure — the image of the woman I thought I should be. Wearing them felt like stepping into an alter ego. I’d feel exposed without them, like my body was too bare, too vulnerable to be seen. They were a shield — not only against the outside world, but also from the self-inflicted harm underneath.
Now that I work more often with clay, I can’t physically keep the long nails — but the imagery stays. I continue sculpting exaggerated fingers as a kind of surrogate body. They’ve come to represent a fractured but persistent self: childish, anxious, performative, but also reaching, grasping, becoming.
Formally, fingers are just fascinating.
Their fleshy softness against rigid joints. The way they contort and stretch on command. Detached from the hand, they feel uncanny — almost alien. Like little creatures with their own lives. They represent both intimacy and agency. To bind a finger feels like a violation; to lose one, a grief. And yet, we barely pay them any attention. There are ten of them, after all.
Q: You explore collapse, distortion, discomfort. What’s worth digging for in that kind of tension?
A: Art, to me, is always an extension of the self. Some hide it better than others, but I don’t think it’s possible to fully separate personal psyche from visual expression. The collapse, distortion, and discomfort in my work mirror my own inner states — but also speak to something broader. Terry Smith once said that contemporaneity is marked by radical disjuncture — temporal, geographic, perceptual. We’re living in a fragmented world. I think the disillusionment of our time makes these themes feel inevitable, even necessary.
Q: How do you think about emotion when you shift between drawing, video, sculpture?
A: Emotion is the one constant. I’m rarely working in a single medium at once — my studio practice is a swirl of half-finished videos, sculptures, drawings. I’m not a planner. I let emotion and intuition guide the work, and often that means it evolves mid-process. Very ADHD of me, I know. But I like to think the chaos is honest. If I’m crying in a performance, the tears are real. I couldn’t fake them if I tried. A messy canvas is usually made in a moment of internal rupture. A calmer piece, during emotional quiet. There’s no hierarchy — every medium has its own language for feeling. What matters is sincerity.
Q: There’s rawness in your work, but also restraint. How do you find that balance?
A: I rely on intuition. I don’t have a fixed style or method — each work feels like a new attempt at translation. I think that’s part of what keeps it sincere. When there’s no template, you have no choice but to feel your way through. I try to be honest, to follow what feels real, even if I can’t always explain it.
Q: What kind of feeling do you want to leave behind in someone looking at your work?
A: Confusion. Discomfort. Recognition. Resonance. It doesn’t have to be positive. It just has to do something. I’d rather someone feel unsettled than feel nothing at all. The worst thing my work could be is decorative. I want it to get under the skin — linger in the subconscious like an aftertaste. That weird, inarticulable feeling of this is off, but I don’t know why. That’s when I know it’s working.
