2008.05.21-2008.07.19

Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne, Germany

Ding Yi calls the series of paintings that he has been working on since 1988 Appearances of crosses. He could also call them cross paintings. But the word “appearances” is crucial, because it says something about the impact and the essence of his painting. This oscillates between appearance and disappearance, thus eluding reproducibility. It is only in front of the original, before sometimes wall-filling formats of 200 x 380 cm, that we discover, as viewers, that these pictures rely on our participation. They demand active seeing, which requires us to move around in the room. Only then do we understand them for what they really are: painting based on personal experience.

Their place of origin is Shanghai, that vast and vibrant metropolis, whose economy is enjoying a spectacular boom and whose downtown areas accommodate up to 32,000 people per square kilometer. Perhaps as Europeans we need to visualize this population density and the systems of organization it spawns and the optical over-stimulation it generates, in order to understand the thronging profusion and the dynamism that is typical of these pictures as something specific. Their backdrop is the mega-grid of skyscraper architecture, the flashing of neon signs, the ornament of the masses in the streets.

To Western eyes, these pictures of Chinese artist Ding Yi are initially rather like pattern painting. They are based on simple geometric patterns, which generate a continual series of variations. Viewed for longer, especially from alternately close to and further away, this apparently so innocuous pattern evolves into something confusingly multi-layered, which reaches beyond the purely visual, aesthetic experience. What we have to do with here is a phenomenon of mass, of agglomeration, of overcrowding. The concept of “Chinese Maximalism” responds to American and European minimalism here with an aesthetics of plethora. Accordingly the maxim is not “Less is more” but “More is more.” The result is a horror vacui painting which treats dialectically the polarity of vacuity and plethora. Ding Yi demonstrates in his Appearances of crosses that super abundance can also be read as emptiness. The greater our distance from the picture, the more compact, the more monochrome the surfaces become. The unquietness of the detail is smoothed out of them. But if we go up closer, they reveal the play of colour hidden within them. Trompe-l’oeil effects appear, a discrepancy opens up between the real and the perceived. The eye no longer sees the lines in the two-dimensional plane. They become solid threads, warp and weft, leading like layers of weave deeper and deeper into a picture and colour space that we cannot see the end of. The lines lie one on top of the other in several layers, completely covering the surfaces as though with fine hand-knotting, and so also deceptively taking on the haptic qualities of textiles. This is not only true of the pictures painted on canvas, which are mounted without frames on the thick stretchers, but also of the drawings on structured paper. Colour plays a cucial role here in bringing out this animated play of closely placed and overlapping lines. These compositions, closely woven right to their edges, seem actually to vibrate in their alternately energetic and tranquillizing pattern of coloured lines.

Ding Yi, Recent Works

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DING YI (Galerie Karsten Greve)