Koori Ding
About
Koori Ding (b.1998, Beijing) lives and works in Sichuan and Beijing.
As a painter and poet moving between cities and rural hinterlands, his practice constructs poetic structures through painting shaped by language, writing, and sound. Rooted in the study of minority languages, oral traditions, and informal frameworks, his work explores how systems of vision, text, and rhythm interweave, interfere, and continuously self-transform. Through repetition, rupture, and metaphor, he builds a visual logic akin to poetic syntax. Long-term fieldwork in marginal regions informs his inquiry into how perception and narration are fragmented and reorganized into nonlinear, shifting paths.
Influenced by the intricacies of contemporary literature, as well as classical Chinese poetics, modern Japanese verse, and tonal dialects, he treats painting as a vessel of spatial thought—where language becomes structure and rhythm replaces narrative. His practice reimagines the tension between systems and anti-systems, generating a self-aware and ever-reconstructing visual field.
Education
2024 – BFA – Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, US
2025 – MA – Painting, Royal College of Art, London, UK
Selected Exhibitions
2024 – language, lore, and superstitions, hardboiled, Chicago, IL, US
2024 – Oriented by Dialect: Those Diffracted Scenes among Us, ZII Gallery, London, UK
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