by Jose Villarreal

2 Octorber 2024

In Blueprint for a Soft Collision, Chun Ding constructs a quiet confrontation between nature and apparatus, softness and control. Rendered through cyanotype on textile, the work resists the visual certainty often associated with photographic images. Instead, it offers a surface that feels fragile, porous, and unresolved: a space where forms do not settle into hierarchy but drift in uneasy proximity.

Organic elements such as reeds, feathers, and leaves appear suspended beside mechanical fragments like a tattoo needle, yet neither fully asserts dominance. The title suggests structure, a blueprint, but what unfolds is anything but fixed. Rather than providing a design for order, Chun Ding proposes a system of vulnerability, where collision is not violent but almost tender. The interaction between botanical traces and technical precision reads less as opposition and more as an intimate entanglement.

Materiality plays a central role. The fabric is not simply a carrier of imagery; it is an active participant. Creases, seams, and distortions become visible as evidence of handling, sunlight exposure, and duration. The photograph ceases to be an image and becomes instead a bodily surface, marked, stained, and unsettled. This shift transforms viewing into a tactile encounter, where perception extends beyond the eye into an awareness of process, texture, and time.

Chun Ding’s use of cyanotype is deliberately restrained. The familiar deep blue does not dramatise, but whispers. It immerses each object in an atmosphere where clarity dissolves into resonance. In this fog-like chromatic field, the mechanical does not appear alien; it becomes strangely organic, while plant life reveals an unexpected volatility.

Blueprint for a Soft Collision does not narrate, explain, or resolve. It lingers in suspension, allowing the viewer to inhabit uncertainty. Chun Ding offers no conclusion, only a meditative condition where systems soften, materials breathe, and collisions occur not as ruptures but as quiet negotiations between what grows and what is made.