Ding Shilun’s “Sugar-Coated Bullets” Turn Ghost Stories Into a Study of Mistranslation
Ding Shilun’s paintings can feel like a lure: luminous color, crisp line, and a surface that reads as playful from across the room. Then the atmosphere shifts. Up close, the sweetness begins to function as a veil, and what emerges is a more disquieting psychological terrain — one shaped by mistranslation, misreading, and the uneasy power of narrative itself.
The Chinese artist Ding Shilun (b. 1998) has been explicit about what he is not trying to do. He has said he was never particularly drawn to “mainstream historical narrative,” which he associates with a heroic tone and a tidy sense of meaning. Instead, he has sought out the parts of stories that resist that framing — the details that are omitted, softened, or made legible only through distortion.
A turning point came when Ding spent six months in the UK on exchange at Chelsea College of Arts. The experience, he has explained, made him realize how dependent his earlier figurative language was on a specific cultural context. Removed from that context, he began asking how to “explain” himself and, more pointedly, how to translate effectively. The question pushed him to reconsider what painting could do when it is asked to carry meaning across distance.
Ding later continued his studies at the Royal College of Art. During the pandemic, he worked in the constraints of his own room, producing small, quick pieces that became a foundation for his later practice. When he returned to a properly scaled studio and resumed large-format canvases, his work changed: more figures entered the frame, and the narratives grew more complex.
That expansion came with a problem Ding has named directly. Once he began working within a stronger narrative framework, he said, he had to confront the fact that narrative is a form of power. Rather than offering a straightforward explanation of his imagery, he has described a method of approaching a story or a fragment of history, studying its structure, and tracing how it connects to his own experience.
Over time, Ding gravitated toward the tradition of Chinese zhiguai stories — accounts of ghosts, monsters, and the seemingly absurd that often reflect social reality indirectly. For him, the appeal is not “history” as a stable record, but the way it is retold, mistranslated, and distorted. He has described an interest in the emotional sequence that can follow encounters with the unknown: not knowing that hardens into fear, anger, and even hatred. His focus, he has said, is the moment before fear and after hatred — the space where something becomes misrecognized.
In Ding’s paintings, the recurring “ghost” figure stands in for that process. He has likened it to a wrongly translated term: a thing that has been rendered incorrectly and must be understood again. His use of zhiguai is not a bid to illustrate traditional supernatural beings so much as a way to visualize how misunderstanding can deform a subject until it becomes less human.
The artist has called his paintings “sugar-coated bullets,” a phrase that captures their double register. From a distance, the work can appear light, even charming. But Ding has argued that sweetness operates like a filter — it can conceal violence and discomfort, while also inviting viewers to come close enough to notice what the surface is hiding.
Audience reactions have underscored that tension. At a solo show in Miami at the Institute of Contemporary Art, some viewers described the work as having a “hell-like” quality. In Guangzhou, Ding’s hometown, others read the paintings as images that could ward off evil. For Ding, those divergent interpretations are not a problem to correct; they are part of the work’s charge.
Formally, his visual language pulls from multiple sources: the precision associated with the Lingnan gongbi tradition, the expressive force of Japanese manga, and the timing and rhythm of humor drawn from stand-up and sitcoms he has said he is obsessed with. Humor, in his view, is difficult — and that difficulty is precisely what makes painting compelling, because simple materials can be made to carry complex, unstable meanings.
Ding has also described his work as a “personal fable,” borrowing a psychological term that points to the amplification of individual experience. He has said he is not interested in universal values so much as emotions that feel true only to him — small feelings expanded into strange tales. In that sense, the ghost in his paintings is less a creature than a mechanism: a way to show how stories change when they travel, and what gets lost — or weaponized — in the translation.
