Fleeting Moments in Stone: The Art of An Ting Teng

This month’s Behind the Lens features the evocative work of An Ting Teng, a Taiwan-born artist based in London whose practice captures a delicate stillness amidst the flux of modern life.

An Ting combines alternative photographic techniques, including liquid emulsion in the darkroom, with sculpture, installation, and bookmaking. Her art serves as a meditation on the intricate relationship between humanity and nature, bridging natural elements and artificial constructs to explore themes of memory, time, and transformation. With a keen eye for the quiet moments within the vastness of time, her work speaks to the endurance and fragility of landscapes and materials, as seen in her series, “A Stone within a Mountain, a Mountain within a Stone.”

An Ting Teng’s work invites us to pause and reflect on the connections between the natural world and our place within it. By combining alternative processes with tactile materials, she creates art that is both visually compelling and deeply introspective.

We had the chance to interview An Ting about her creative journey, artistic process, and the unique techniques she uses in her work.

Interview with An Ting:

SWD: Your work often combines photography with mixed media. How do you approach merging these forms, and what excites you about blurring the boundaries between traditional photography and other materials?

An Ting: In my practice, collecting materials plays a significant role, almost like building an archive. This archive is built through both physical objects and images, creating a foundation for my creative process. I often begin with a texture or part of an image that links to an object I’ve found, or I may incorporate natural materials that resonate with the essence of the images in my collection. I find this approach allows for a more organic blending of elements, where intuition guides how things come together. What excites me about merging photography with other materials is that the result is more than just an image. The added textures and objects bring a new dimension, almost like a form of storytelling without words. Each material enhances or describes the image in its own way, creating a dialogue that speaks beyond the visual. This layered approach feels very natural, especially given my focus on nature and organic elements. It allows me to preserve my work in a way that feels true to the themes I’m exploring, connecting each piece back to the earth and the materials I’ve collected.

SWD: Many of your pieces have an intimate, delicate quality, particularly when exploring themes of fragility and memory. Could you elaborate on how these themes shape your creative vision?

An Ting: Fragility is at the core of my practice, almost like a corridor that guides my exploration, especially when working with liquid emulsion. This process is experimental and highly delicate, which brings a unique vulnerability to the images I create.

When I think about memory, it feels multifaceted—it could be something I’ve personally experienced, a dream, or even a story that’s been passed down and reshaped in interpretation. My aim is for these elements to come together in a way that resonates deeply, allowing viewers to connect with the work through its fragile quality.

In a world where photographic prints are easily produced, consumed, and discarded, I want to slow things down and emphasize a print's delicacy and impermanence. Each piece I make is sensitive to touch, and even slight contact can alter it over time, influenced by oils or temperature. I want people to feel the weight, texture, and ephemerality of the work, challenging the way they perceive photography itself. This fragility, I hope, changes not just how they view my work but also how they engage with memory and the everyday objects that often go unnoticed. In the darkroom, the labor and physicality of creating each piece feel intimate, embedding a sense of time and care into the final image. The process becomes part of the story, and while I may not plan for it to happen this way, I often discover that these quiet layers of memory, fragility, and labor hold a deeper meaning that I want to share with viewers.

SWD: Your publication "A Stone within a Mountain, a Mountain within a Stone" features test strips as the central element. What inspired you to showcase these typically discarded pieces, and how do they contribute to the narrative of the publication?

An Ting: The test strips in A Stone within a Mountain, a Mountain within a Stone hold a unique place in my work, representing a crucial part of the darkroom process. For anyone familiar with printing, test strips are essential—they allow you to fine-tune exposure, color, texture, and contrast. In traditional printing, they’re often cut small to conserve paper and usually discarded, but for me, they are precious. Each test strip is a result of working with emulsions and alternative media like marble and stone, where consistency is difficult, and every piece becomes distinct.

These strips capture different stages of an image’s evolution, often in unexpected ways, with varied tones, framing, and even accidental marks. Over time, I’ve found that the imperfections and unique qualities of these strips reveal something new, a fresh perspective on the original image that I may have overlooked. Instead of discarding them, I’ve preserved these fragments, seeing them as treasures that offer insight into the fluidity of the darkroom process and the organic unpredictability of each print. I wanted to share these test strips as a way of revealing the hidden side of the photographic process. Small, unevenly shaped, and often containing textures or details that magnify a moment within the larger image, each test strip carries its own narrative. By preserving them in this publication, I invite viewers to interpretand experience these fragments as individual works that hold their own weight and significance. In the hands of the viewer, these tiny pieces become more than discarded fragments—they offer a new perspective on the larger image.

SWD: You frequently use alternative photographic processes, such as Liquid Light. What drew you to these techniques, and how do they enhance your connection to the subjects or themes you explore?

An Ting: It all began with a sense of dissatisfaction—something about the standard photographic paper felt too uniform, too perfect, and flawless. And the lack of texture and presence, I craved in my work. Photographic paper is consistent and easy to replicate, yet I wanted each image to be unique and tactile. This led me to experiment with alternative processes of Light, which allowed me to transform various materials into photographic surfaces.

Working with these techniques, I can experiment with photography by creating textures that capture the raw, unpredictable quality of natural materials. It’s fascinating to see how different mediums —like cotton paper, marble, and tin box —bring out new layers within each image, enhancing my connection to the subjects I portray. These processes give me the freedom to create images that can’t simply be reproduced, adding depth to my exploration of time, geology, and human connection to the natural world. In many ways, this experimentation has become an integral part of my practice, as it reflects my drive to challenge and redefine what more photography can be.

SWD: In blending photography with handmade elements and alternative processes, how do you navigate between control and spontaneity in your work?

An Ting: Thank you for this question—it’s interesting because I don’t always consciously think about the balance between control and spontaneity in my work. From the beginning, my process is naturally spontaneous, whether it’s in collecting materials, capturing images, or building my archive. Yet, there is also a level of intentionality that emerges as I decide how to display and pair these elements. This decision-making is a form of subtle control, where I step back and navigate through the spontaneous collection to find clarity, creating a storyline or narrative.

Balancing spontaneity with control is essential because if my approach leans too much on spontaneity, it can feel overwhelming, almost like a collage with too much information. On the other hand, if I over-control the presentation, it risks becoming overly curated, losing some of the raw energy that makes the work resonate. I aim to keep this balance, allowing space for intuition and experimentation while shaping the work enough to guide viewers through the narrative.