An encounter in Shanghai

I clearly remember my first meeting with Ding Yi. It was in 2004, at a time when China, brimming with self-confidence, was just coming to the attention of the Western art scene again. After the “cynical realism” of the 1990s, positions of conceptual art and abstract painting, which had previously been more familiar from Korea, were now also attracting the interest of a broader public that was no longer exclusively Western, but also based in China itself. I was working on a book about the Shanghai art scene, and this abstract painter seemed to me to take a very original position, unimpressed by trends. So I set off, equipped with the usual tool of the time: friends had given me a small piece of paper with Ding Yi’s address written on it in Chinese. I handed over the note to the taxi driver. He nodded and accelerated. We drove through the roaring city and he dropped me off at a longtang, one of the typical narrow, densely built-up alleyways that can still be found everywhere in Shanghai today. I wandered around in a maze of dwellings and warehouses until I finally came across the right entrance. Ding Yi’s studio was located in a hidden, inconspicuous rear building. The artist opened the door to his studio, and greeted me with his unmistakable, mischievous smile while inviting me in. A series of dark, convoluted rooms huddled under a low ceiling that seemed poorly supported by numerous wooden pillars. The artist smoked without pause, as many Chinese still do today. He was in the company of a friend who was to act as translator, and was also smoking. Ding Yi silently moved some canvases around in his storage room so that I could see them. At some point, he led me through more rooms stacked with paintings to a curtain behind which it suddenly became light. Here, waiting on the white lacquered floor, was a huge, brightly lit work table on which he spelled out his paintings, line by line, row by row, using brushes and stencils in a logical order that only he could understand. Ding Yi would answer my long, complicated questions with just a few syllables each time, or so it seemed to me. The interpreter began to sweat excessively in the heat of that July afternoon. It took him a long time to think each time before he repeated the artist’s answers in English. However, the conversation which I remember well when I think about Ding Yi’s art again now, many years later, turned out to be extremely informative, and I learned a lot about the wealth of stories that abstraction can tell.

Exploring the canvas: How it started

Born in Shanghai in 1962, Ding Yi still lives and works in the city today. He first trained at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute before going on to study traditional Chinese painting at the University of Shanghai’s Department of Fine Arts. In the early 1990s, he became known in the West as one of the first abstract painters in China. In 1993, he took part in both the Venice Biennale and the pioneering exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, China Avant-Garde, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Based on his interest in social realism, which he encountered in his youth, Ding Yi, like many of his fellow students, increasingly turned to Western art during his time as an art student. For instance, he studied the painting technique that Maurice Utrillo used in his works, but in the following years he also explored positions in traditional and contemporary Chinese painting. His pieces were inspired by the work of Zhao Wuji, for example, who, in his painting, strove for a synthesis of Chinese and Western influences. From 1983, Ding Yi started to make his first forays into abstract painting. “I had already seen abstract paintings by colleagues when I was a student,” he explained in our conversation, “but this was not pure abstraction because content was still visible. It was important to me to push abstraction further; to push painting into an area without socio-cultural references and concrete associations.”

From the late 1980s, he has exclusively been focusing on crosses, initially in ink on paper, but before long in the form of paintings on canvas and other painting supports. In 1988, when he created the first piece in his Appearance of Crosses series, a series he was going to pursue for decades, postmodernism dominated the Western art scene and the means of abstraction seemed outdated and obsolete. Ding Yi, by contrast, always assumed a position on the margins of this discourse; thanks to the stringency of the minimalist idiom and formal limitation, this allows him to this day to open up a wide space for his painting, to develop the chosen sign, and to constantly explore it over and over again. Ding Yi’s painting is characterized by striving for the greatest possible distance from cultural attributions, contexts, and symbolism. At the same time, through the consistent variation of the cross motif, his tableaux offer a wide range of new possible meanings.

He created the first work, Appearance of Crosses I, in 1988. It was a powerful statement, although still clearly oriented towards an incunabulum of Western art history. The consistent, strict matrix of crosses, which fit into a grid as if they had been placed there by machine, clearly alludes to Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. Ding Yi’s canvas is also divided into red, yellow and blue, but the colors cover the rectangle in pastel shades and uniform, horizontal lines as if they were trying to drive out the last remnants of the painter’s gesture from abstraction so as to assert a new, unprecedented discipline in uniformity – a discipline that this artist constantly plays out and varies over and over again.

His chosen media have changed over the decades, as has his style: whereas at the beginning of the 1980s he used rulers and colored adhesive tape to transfer a mechanistic, anonymous character to his paintings, from the 1990s he began to integrate a more gestural quality into his works. From 1993 onwards, he also used chalk and charcoal, which brought about a different kind of roughness and reduction. From 1997, he integrated checkered fabrics as supports, further enhancing the depth and feel of his works. Since around the year 2000, he has used fluorescent colors, pigments, stencils, and stamps.

The crosses themselves and their symbolism have also become more complex over time. Yi’s works are exclusively composed of colors and the signs + and × placed on them. By superimposing numerous layers of paint and the cross shapes set upon them, the artist develops an astonishing variety of color nuances and an extraordinary degree of spatial depth.

Opening up the galaxy

Ding Yi’s art began with the symbol of the cross and is still based on it today. It has now found its mature form in an open galaxy of crosses that seems as vast as the universe. Ding Yi began working on his open, flickering galaxies in a deliberately uncontrolled manner by placing individual crosses. Without a recognizable underlying system that might be applied to each picture, he places bright crosses on the structure which, due to its complex spatial depth, appears chaotic at first. Everything seems to emerge from intuition.

Some works from Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses series – works on fragile, handmade Tibetan paper or on linen – seem reminiscent of biomorphic forms or floral patterns. With their use of mineral pigments and pastels, they have an ephemeral quality, while their texture resembles woven textiles and fabrics. Some pieces look like the backs of embroideries.

The large-scale Appearance of Crosses paintings from 2023 and 2024, by contrast, seem to draw on the texture of the stars in the night sky. These paintings are based on deep, iridescent shades of blue, interspersed with an abundance of black crosses that condense into a tangle reminiscent of digital markings or the tracks of unknown animals in the forest or on the bottom of the sea. Delicate constellations of stars crossed in white are placed on top, just as the human brain draws them when it combines individual stars into constellations to be able to read them in their entirety.

This density of signs is no coincidence. As Ding Yi explains: “At the beginning of my work, I was very much concerned with perspective and its significance in Western art. Perspective was important in painting to integrate different temporal levels into the picture, a before and an after, although the before never seems as important as the after. Chinese painting is structured in an entirely different manner – the surface on which various things can take place simultaneously is what matters here. Hierarchies are important in traditional Chinese painting: the Emperor dominates the picture in terms of size and is placed in the center; the subordinates are depicted in smaller sizes. This also applies to certain elements typically shown in a landscape; there are clear hierarchies. What I am interested in is a compression into the depths – the things that lie on the last layers come to the fore, while the others seem to recede backwards. This also breaks up the picture plane in terms of time: in this way it is possible to integrate different levels of time into the composition.”

Meaning and void. Sign and trace

Starting from technical markings for the production of prints, i.e. merely functional signs that are part of a technical process in which they provide orientation, Ding Yi began to focus on the cross.

In Western culture, especially in Christianity, the cross has numerous, mainly religious meanings, whereas in China the shape of the cross is associated with a wide variety of non-religious connotations. For instance, it is used as a decorative pattern on everyday items such as porcelain and fabrics. One might think that the artist deliberately chose it for himself because it is so far removed from any connotation, or even the content and symbols, of traditional Chinese painting. Based on the different meanings in the West and the East, Yi’s use of the cross can also be seen as a playful gesture, balancing between levels of meaning and cultures. Ding Yi’s paintings exude dynamism and power, transcending cultural attributions and opening up to a universal reading.

Concerning the symbolism of the cross, he says: “The cross means nothing and at the same time contains so much. It is a symbol of the greatest possible precision, which at the same time seems to negate the possibility of individual expression. That is the most important thing to me, although I can accept that every observer, depending on their cultural background, associates something different with the pictures and reads something different into them. Their openness makes this possible.”

Ding Yi has worked in this manner from the very beginning: exploring the simplest geometric sign in all its variations, and allowing it to light up over and over again along the lines of human perception. The artist’s approach is surprisingly playful: he is always open to experimentation and the new possibilities of dialog that two intersecting lines can trigger.

Ding Yi paints the relationships between the signs, thus coming closer to the human brain than one might suspect, since nothing spurs the human imagination as much as a sequence of unconnected signs. The brain immediately strives for order, looking for structures and patterns. However, Ding Yi’s work always throws the observing eye back on itself in the aimlessness and potential infinity of what is depicted. Everything we see exists only in our imagination, these works seem to say. And is this not challenge enough?

From the very beginning, his works were detached from specific readings, and asserted their significance beyond trends and prevailing discourses. Some works seem to have been carefully stripped of all traditional references, some pictures in their restrained colors appear like worn fabrics. For a time, the crosses took on a very gestural, authorial quality, with loose brushstrokes often remaining recognizable as such. In other instances, the artist used stencils or stamps, giving the crosses a prefabricated and anonymous quality. While remaining limited in terms of content, Yi’s formal palette has constantly expanded: soft, almost organic shades exist alongside vibrant, signal-like colors; in addition to chalk or charcoal on unprimed nettle, he now uses glitter, fluorescent colors, and a variety of picture supports.

The rhythm of the city

Ding Yi’s works are interactive in that the viewer’s eye both perceives the depth of the entire picture surface and is invited to move closer to the work so as to fully immerse itself in the depth of the picture surface and explore movement, dynamics, traces, and perhaps even the cartography of imaginary cities.

A Mondrian rhythm, the all-over ornamentation, and the use of checkered fabrics as a painting ground touch on Western contexts. At the same time, the absolute flatness of the pictorial space conveys a proximity to cartography. The multiple layers of the picture, which gain depth simply through the arrangement and superposition of the crosses, seem to turn these paintings into maps of a timeless and placeless cosmos in which, for Ding Yi, much of the changeable shape of his home city of Shanghai shines through.

In the beginning, western minimal and hard-edge artists were an important influence. “I was interested in structures that, in keeping with the high level of industrialization surrounding me, were intended to look as if they were prefabricated by machines,” he says of his early works. To this day, he describes his art as an expression of his “being in the city.” His paintings become a seismographic record of urban and social changes, capturing them in the energetic shimmering and blurring of complex superimposed crosses. Sometimes abstraction actually tells the best story – in this case, a comforting one. The cosmos of human experience, even if everything in it seems to be accelerating without stopping, always offers us surprising moments providing support and orientation, not least in the field of art.

Ding Yi’s paintings embrace a wealth of interpretations and possible references that transcend abstract painting proper. His pieces thus seem to correspond to a movement of philosophically penetrating a self-chosen object, in analogy to the formal and semantic “criss-crossing” that Wittgenstein referred to: traversing a familiar terrain again and again, constantly taking new paths, and yet keeping returning to the core.

Like a cartographer, he incorporates both spatial and content-related experience into his work: at first, everything on the canvas seems chaotic and inextricable, yet upon closer inspection it reveals a wealth of complex structures and follows its own rhythm. As in the city of Shanghai itself, everything in Ding Yi’s works appears to grow incessantly in all directions. This dynamic seems to permeate both the fabric of the city and Yi’s art with movement and possible meaning.

This openness, moving from the concentrated minimalism of the early years to a vibrant all-over style in which the cross patterns provide pace and direction as well as calm and orientation, characterizes Ding Yi’s mature work. The clear, dominant grid patterns of the early years disintegrate into infinite motion, while the clusters of crosses become more complex and ornamental.

Given this initially surprising dialog between abstraction and immediate reality, art and urbanity, painting and architecture, it is only fitting that Ding Yi’s work should now also be present in Shanghai’s public space: with interlocking crosses that everyone can read as they please, his Light Tower on the banks of the Yangpu River points to both the future and the past of the city and of art. Despite all their dynamism, each of the two remains very much at one with itself.

(This text is included in the catalogue DING Y I 丁乙, published by GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE, 2024)