The first time you see a real Ding Yi painting (as opposed to a reproduction in a book) is to be amazed by the almost obsessive level of dedication the paintings show, and to understand that there’s nothing mechanical in the work, just something vibrant and living; a kind of stylistic hybridity.

Martin Guinard, Curator, LUMA Arles

My first encounter with Ding Yi’s art was in 1993 at the Beijing home of Dutch art researcher and curator Hans van Dijk (1946–2002). It was not surprising then, that foreign eyes interested in experiencing the breadth of “New Art”1 in China would be drawn to Ding Yi’s minimalist, “rational” abstract language. In that formative era of the contemporary art scene, Ding Yi’s “cross” was—and has, to a great extent, remained—a largely unique visual language; a motif that extended beyond the obviously politicized imagery of styles that were in vogue through out the 1990s such as Cynical Realism, Political Pop, and Gaudy Art. And, with its overt refusal of readable narrative or imposed meaning, it felt daringly radical.

The evolving weave of Ding Yi’s “cross” compositions was more than just a distinctive aesthetic style. Within a cultural framework steeped in a recent history of figuration (Socialist Realism) with no point of reference for the abstract (as per Western art history’s definition and range of styles), the crossing- line motif represented a gentle but unapologetically defiant refusal to bow to the status quo.2 Certainly, prior examples of abstract painterly expression emerged in the decade before Ding Yi embarked upon his chosen course in 1988. Notably, in the Chinese capital, within the circle of didactic artists who mingled with the No Name Group,3 there were painters like Zhang Wei, Ma Kelu, and Zhu Jinshi. Closer to home in Shanghai, through out the early 1980s, Ding Yi became familiar with the practice of now- famous masters like Yu Youhan, Qiu Deshu, and Zhang Jianjun. What united non- figurative painters wherever they appeared in that era was, in the words of Ma Kelu, that they were each wrestling with “not what to paint, but how to paint.”

Still, despite their sincere efforts, there was little enthusiasm for abstract art from either the establishment or a general audience.4 Abstract paintings by key figures from the Western genre had been displayed in Shanghai and Beijing as part of the touring exhibition “American Paintings from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston” in 1981. This exhibition, which included a Jackson Pollock, drew a large audience.5 However, Chinese artists’ forays into non- figurative art received mixed responses. While some viewers were intrigued, most were confused or uncertain about how to respond to art that lacked obvious content or narrative. In several notable cases, the paintings prompted strong criticism from local authorities, which placed significant pressure on the artists.6 Then a young student at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts College (1980–83), Ding Yi was aware of these furors. Yu Youhan, a teacher at the college, often advised Ding Yi and participated in discussions among the artists who gathered in his studio. Despite the disinterest, criticism, and controversy, Ding Yi remained dedicated to his chosen path (see p. 202). When referring to the trajectory of his artistic career, he repeatedly referenced his strong dislike of Soviet art— the prevailing style of visual expression at the time—and his initial interest in the work of China’s “Modernist” artists, who had studied in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as Maurice Utrillo, the French painter known for his cityscapes with their accent on urban spatial constructs.7 Art historian, curator, and current director of Beijing Inside- Out Art Museum, Carol Yinghua Lu provides an account of these early influences and impulses:

Ding has described his years at Shanghai Arts and Crafts College…and with artist Yu Youhan, as instrumental to his development. During this period [Ding] was exposed to early Modernist movements and basic techniques of Western painting, through reading publications and catalogues borrowed from Yu, who pursued abstraction as the embodiment of Asian philosophy. Ding was also impressed by the works of Chinese masters such as Wu Dayu and Guan Liang, who were among the first generation of Chinese oil painters educated abroad in the 1920s, in Paris and Japan respectively. He attributed one of his earliest artistic epiphanies to his introduction to the work of Cezanne, without which he would not have pursued abstraction.8

There is an easy but reductive train of thought that sees Shanghai as an obvious place for abstract art to gain a foothold in China. There is, of course, evidence of abstract painting appearing in many parts of the country from the late 1980s through the 1990s, along with the spread of new ideas about art. “Abstract” was seen as a language of free expression and rebellion against orthodoxy. In Shanghai, abstract art—particularly in its more decorative forms—seemed to fit well with the city’s colonial modern history centered around the French Concession and its diverse European styles of architecture and Art Deco interiors. However, ironically, during the era in which Ding Yi grew up and came of age, Shanghai was overshadowed by a dowdy cloud of history that settled over it in the years leading up to 1949 and would only begin to fade away in 1992.9 So, before the city’s urban renewal provided Ding Yi with inspiration, the appeal of non- figurative expression, with its use of the “cross” motif, lay in its radical departure from official art practices. The cross motif has its own set of figurative references, one of which, within Ding Yi’s sociocultural sphere, was its association with negation and the denunciation of “bad elements” during the Cultural Revolution. In contemporary art practice, the cross motif was indeed avant-garde.

For most of the abstract artists emerging during the early years of the contemporary art scene, the painterly language they adopted was, by and large, intuitive and “fast,” flowing in a way that referenced the aura of ink and evoked their shared curiosity toward Eastern philosophy, as well as their interest in returning to existential anthropomorphic sensations associated with ancient Eastern culture. In comparison, Ding Yi’s cross motif could be described as less esoteric and arguably more rigorously avant-garde in its inspiration. Ding Yi used abbreviated lines to create a mark that defied any form of imposed meaning: a short line regularly intersected by another, forming the cross that he famously incorporated into the titles of his paintings.

Over time, Ding Yi’s persistence with this chosen motif paid off, as he gained acclaim and respect. Starting from 2012, his “cross” paintings have been presented via a number of significant solo exhibitions in China and abroad, of varying scale and focus, exploring various aspects of his career. Today, Ding Yi’s crosses have become widely familiar to contemporary audiences, which was unimaginable when they first appeared in the 1980s. However, before a dedicated seminar in 2023, there had been little discussion about what Ding Yi’s art and his choice of abstract motif represent, or how they fit within the context of abstract art in mainland China. The seminar, organized in conjunction with the solo exhibition Cross Galaxy curated by Yongwoo Lee, provided a rare opportunity to explore Ding Yi’s career within “the contextual changes and syncretism of contemporary art in China over the past forty years, from the 1980s after China’s reform and opening to the present.”10 Describing contemporary art as “a global bazaar where all kinds of ideological contexts and hybridized visual forms breathe together in the same space,” Yongwoo Lee proposed the topic “Aesthetic Hybridity in Contemporary Art” as an overarching theme to explore this context from various individual and cultural perspectives. The resulting discussion revealed much about how art and culture are perceived in a contemporary context and how histories and theories span across timeframes and intersect with prevailing cultural practices.

At any given time, every culture is a constantly changing blend of diverse elements that appear and, over time, are replaced as tastes, practical applications, and socioeconomic efficiencies shift their relationships with one another. As Martin Guinard suggested in his keynote for the seminar, creativity is always “a net(work) of influences from the outside.” In terms of Ding Yi’s art, a good example of how an artist juggles an ever- shifting “network of influences from the outside” with self- determined consistency, came in 2012, with the immersive sensations conjured in his solo exhibition Specific, Abstracted.11 This took place at the height of his fascination with DayGlo fluorescent paints, which were used to create dazzling compositions that resembled constellations of brilliant pigments exploding outward, similar to images of the Big Bang. Many of these compositions were painted on tartan cloth, which further added to the visual excitement of the exhibition.

In the early days, Ding Yi experimented with a painting style that Yongwoo Lee describes as almost “machine- made.” In China, during the 1980s, a range of new materials, like plastics, became readily available as a result of the social and economic changes that were taking place. The government policy of “Opening and Reform,” launched in 1978, paved the way for mass manufacturing that was no longer limited to utilitarian socialist tastes and directives. As Carol Lu notes, “In the midst of the revolutionary zeal of the art world in the 1980s, Ding adopted repetition as a direct expression of freedom from any social or ideological expectations for artistic practice and the turmoil of society.” 12 Indeed, in the mid-1990s, I remember Ding Yi describing how he drew inspiration from industrial design patterns, aiming for basic blocks, geometries, and primary colors that would have wide appeal, much like a piece of fabric. However, during the early stages of the “crosses,” this combination of art with “design” was not widely appreciated by critics, authorities, or viewers.

Compositions like Appearance of Crosses I 13 may suggest a machine- like flatness (see p. 133), but Ding Yi soon expanded his materials beyond gouache and acrylic/oil paint to include pencil, pastel, and charcoal. The cross “drawings” from the early 1990s have a delightful messiness on the surface and along the edges of their “grids” or webs. This messiness is a result of the combination of materials themselves and the occasional unintentional smudging of marks as the lines crisscrossed the paper from corner to corner and side to side. In discussions about Ding Yi’s work, much reference is made to the “grid.” Ding Yi began by mapping “cross” permutations on graph paper, much like gridded paper is used in the practice of calligraphy in China. With time and practice, he became so skilled that he no longer needed the grid lines. Throughout the 1990s, as his practice evolved, the strict grid started to break down. The crossing lines always seemed to be breaking free from any grid- like order. To seek conformity within Ding Yi’s compositional style is to be met with resistance to rules and the discovery of variety, where the “crosses” are often not crosses at all. Founder and Director of ShanghArt Gallery, Lorenz Helbling explains, “You think Ding Yi is always painting crosses, but if you look carefully at the paintings, work by work, they go up and down and turn around, and of the thousands and thousands of little strokes, you never know which stroke is more important than any other one.”

With hindsight, the variation and diversity of cross permutations and the tonal range of the compositions have a remarkable synergy with the shifts in the urban environment that Ding Yi experienced, both in Shanghai and during his opportunities to travel the world. From neon lights to the grid- like web of city streets and structures, if Ding Yi was looking for a contemporary shorthand for urban life, in the way that Mondrian references New York’s bustle in Broadway Boogie Woogie, then such “scenes” as he channeled through his work provide jumping- off points for drawing viewers in. Hypnotized by the complex blaze of crosses, devoid of preloaded meaning, viewers instead discover a visual language that is open entirely to interpretation. The Art Museum’s Executive Director Shao Shu speaks of Ding Yi’s approach as providing space for the general audience to read paintings from their perspective, stating that “Ding Yi draws upon a quite ancient way to express poetry. In the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), Chinese poets used only nouns to express ‘landscape’; in very few words, without the need for complex sentences, they could express an entire universe, not dissimilar to Ding Yi.” As Carol Lu adds, “the sign of the cross is relevant to the way we perceive the organization of the universe, while remaining free of specific references to immediate reality.”14 This is especially true in the large multiple- panel compositions produced in recent years, fashioned as bas- reliefs, where Ding Yi carves back through multiple layers of hardened acrylic paint to create a universe of pulsating light.

Beijing- based curator and writer Cui Cancan, who served as curator for a major solo exhibition in Ding Yi’s hometown Ningbo in 2023, reminds us that “For Ding Yi, ‘cross’ is a process, not a result.” Indeed, Ding Yi’s art remains a model of expression only achieved through intense hours of manual labor. Still, Ding Yi has demonstrated a gift for a language of art through which vibrations of the present reverberate in all their myriad complexity; the picture plane is an almost virtual maze and space of meditation. Here, there is a sense of synergy with the patterns of Tibetan mandalas that Ding Yi experienced during several trips to Tibet in 2019–20, in preparation for a solo exhibition in Lhasa.

So where does Ding Yi’s art fit within the “contextual changes and syncretism of contemporary art in China over the past 40 years”? As Cui Cancan explains, “Although, conceptual art has influenced China since the 1990s, most artists only borrowed from it temporarily and soon after gave up. For them, ‘repetition’ and ‘minimalism’ were merely a means to resist and fight against the radical changes in Chinese contemporary art or society. It never formed a system. By comparison, Ding Yi persisted, evolving his own style and a language marked by consistency.” This is reiterated by Gong Yan, director of the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, who concludes: “Amidst the changes and renewals of society one after another, Ding Yi has always maintained his own rhythm, becoming the paranoid who responds to all changes by remaining unchanged.”

1

“New Art” refers to the phrase coined by curator- gallerist Johnson Chang Tsong- zung, for the seminal 1993 exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989.

2

To understand the radical nature of “abstract” art during this period and why it was so vehemently opposed, artist/cultural critic/writer Zhou Chuan explains in his interview for Asia Art Archive’s “Materials of the Future,” that anyone admitted to an art school would instantly become a “people’s cultural worker” or an “art worker in service of the people.” Graduates in the mid-1990s were typically assigned a job upon completing their studies. “From the first day at the academy, the student would be set for life.” In order to serve the people, the art produced had to align with ideological and political objectives. This meant creating figurative art influenced by Soviet Realism. It was truly radical then, to reject legibility and service by choosing to produce art that conveyed no particular message.

3

The group did not set out to name itself “No Name,” the label came later for the “group of people who liked painting together” (Zhang Wei) but did not formally name themselves. The group was established in the early 1970s, and their first group exhibition took place on December 31, 1974 (Zhang Wei recalls others citing 1973 or 1975 as the year).

4

Yu Youhan, who started creating abstract works in 1980, explains that he was only able to introduce abstract art to his students at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts College after the mid-1980s. Even then, he had to refer to it as “decorative painting” rather than “abstract art.” Interview with Yu Youhan, Asia Art Archive, “Materials of the Future” projects, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJk5D4ztdlA.

5

“The Boston exhibition—12 abstract paintings, in context with 58 figurative paintings showing 200 years of American art—jolted the Chinese public and artists out of the Soviet and Socialist Realism then permeating the academies in the period following the Cultural Revolution. The artists had no frame of reference to absorb these new art forms, yet thoughtful and inquisitive as they were—moreover, hungry for information from the West—the exhibition changed their way of thinking, and led to experimentation in many directions.” Meredith Palmer, “Culture Shock: American Painting in China, 1981,” LEAP magazine, issue 15 (June 2012).

6

A particular example here is the Shanghai- born and based painter Qiu Deshu. “In 1977, Qiu was assigned to the Luwan District Cultural Palace, a people’s art center under the leadership of the Propaganda Department of the District Bureau of Culture. Facilities included a theater for film and performance, and an exhibition space. Qiu’s job was to paint posters and advertisements for movies and plays, and organize public exhibitions and art classes. He was also in charge of organizing the exhibition space. In 1980, together with several other artists, he formed the Caocao (Grass) Group. In 1981, it was decided to hold a Caocao Group exhibition at the Cultural Palace, where Qiu had previously successfully organized a small series of solo exhibitions on behalf of other artists. The District Bureau of Culture viewed the Caocao Group as an example of bourgeois liberalization, then the target of a political nationwide campaign. The exhibition was closed down, Qiu was criticized for trying to be independent. After the closure, the continued severity of criticism levied again Qiu put him under a lot of emotional stress for a number of years, during which he also suffered a stroke.” Excerpted from an interview between artist Qiu Deshu and historian of twentieth century Chinese art, Jane De Bevoise, “Asia Art Archive in America” (September 2021),

https://www.aaa- a.org/ programs/conversation-with-qiu-deshu

7

A good reference here is Ding Yi’s own description as given in the interview given to Asia Art Archive as part of the project “Materials of the Future: Documenting the Eighties.”

8

Carol Yinghua Lu, review of “Ding Yi,” solo exhibition at Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China, Frieze magazine, issue 147 (May 2012), https://www.frieze.com/article/ding-yi.

9

Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour,” which brought him through Shanghai where he encouraged the city to quicken the pace of economic reform. The past was not erased completely: Ding Yi gives an interesting example of local Shanghainese response to the arrival, in 1987, of the nude painting exhibition, which had caused a stir in Beijing—outrage combined with round- the- block queues (far more even than when audiences in New York queued to see Jeff Koons and his then porn-star wife Ilona Staller [known as la Cicciolina] perform at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in autumn 1991). Shanghainese offered “neither praise nor outrage.” Was the reason that a greater degree of exposure to Western culture, bourgeois though it might be, had long ago instructed them that the nude was the muse of high Art, and not a sign of depravity?

10

Yongwoo Lee, introduction to the seminar “Aesthetic Hybridity in Contemporary Art.”

11

Specific, Abstracted—Ding Yi Solo Exhibition, Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, December 10, 2011, to January 29, 2012, curated by Guo Xiaoyan.

12

Carol Yinghua Lu, review of “Ding Yi,” Frieze (May 2012).

13

Appearance of Crosses I, 1988 Acrylic on canvas, 200 × 180 cm.

14

Carol Yinghua Lu, review of “Ding Yi,” Frieze (May 2012).