This series of 24 paintings reacts to different exhibition spaces, in differing combinations.  The extreme colours are drawn from urban nightscape and are both bold and alluring.  Several layers of different consciousness are embedded beneath the more playful and intriguing patterns made from giant stencils of hybrid motifs drawn from Chinese and Western culture.  In these works, Ting has created a visual and conceptual tension that reaches deeply between the layers.

The Tip of Consciousness followed The Realm of Perception, and as a series, is much more playful and light hearted than the darker works produced before.  It deals with similar themes – memory, dreams, the conscious and unconscious, East and West – but brings the tension between private and public spaces into focus.  Here, Ting explores the construction of personal identity, national identity, and the identity of place.

Ting was inspired to create the paintings following a chance discovery of a box of personal objects, which held no commercial value to the artists, but were full of high personal objects, which held no commercial value to the artist, but were highly sentiment.  She was led to think about how these objects locked into memories, and how they demonstrated who we are and what our relationship is with the world.  Around the same time she was struck  by how many public  monuments there were around London and strong sense of nationalism.  She then used the Surrealist practice of automatic writing to let text flow from her unconscious onto the upper layer of the canvas.

Thus, we see a London nightscape, composed of several different images, and painted with intense colours which contrast with black white text and patterns beneath.  On top of this, drawings of personal, sentimental objects and public monuments litter the canvas.  The process had been repeated several times to create a fragmentary effect in which images are lost and partly hidden.  For the final layer, Ting used giant paper cut-outs as stencils to coat her canvases with cartoon-inspired shapes and silhouettes drawn from everyday experience.