DoDo Jin Ming's most recent series, THE SKY INSIDE, expands on her earlier seascapes and landscapes, in which the awesome and unpredictable forces of nature are of primary concern. At once haunting and mystifying, her images are very intuitive, utilizing the emotive effects of light and shadow. In a recent interview she states:
My pictures reflect how I feel about the world around me. They are more pictures of nature than of the landscape. They are metaphors not description. They are like poetry and music. This is my journey, through darkness to find a way.
My first landscapes, which I called "Behind My Eyes," were taken in 1993, fields of dying sunflowers in France and later North Dakota. Then I photographed at the edge of the sea, in stormy weather, which I called "Free Element."
I feel myself like an eagle flying to remote places. I open my heart to share with everyone.
Born in Beijing in 1955, DoDo Jin Ming spent her teenage years training at the Central Academy of Music as a classical violinist, despite the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, she moved to Hong Kong and performed with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1988, after seeing a Joseph Beuys exhibition, she changed her direction, abandoning her musical career and turning, self-taught, to photography as her new medium. She moved to New York in 1995. In reviewing her work for the New York Times, Vicki Goldberg wrote that her “complex and stirring seascapes are as passionate as opera, as intense as the crashing climactic moments in a Beethoven symphony.”
She has exhibited widely throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Far East. Her work has been shown at the National Museum of Beijing, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum, the Cleveland Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Norton Museum of Art. Most recently, she was included in the acclaimed exhibition Landmark: the Fields of Photography, curated by William Ewing at Somerset House, London.