Introduction

When we think of modern art, we tend to think of 20th-century artists like Piet Mondrian or Pablo Picasso, whose work is presented as such by many museums and art historians. The notion of modern art is an example of how art historical knowledge continues to be shaped by certain cultural conceptions and historical narratives. Long historicised in English-language surveys and standardised university courses, modern art encompasses a period between 1860 and 1970. What is striking about this periodisation is how it defines modern art as a historical movement linked to specific Euro-American political and socio-cultural concerns. This periodisation is so pervasive in art historical discourse that ‘other’ forms of modern art, such as Chinese or Japanese modern art, are prefixed by their national origin.

In today’s globalised, yet still unequal world, a re-examination of the term ‘modern art’ is pertinent. The term continues to imply a central focus on Europe as the source of what we view as art. While Euro-American discourse may refer to a work as Chinese modern art, it is not considered modern in the same way that a work by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) or even Frank Stella (b. 1936) is, and as such invariably requires a national qualifier. To de-centralise and approach the art world as a transnational phenomenon, we need to reflect on these linguistic designations and the terms with which artists and movements are framed.

Ding Yi (b. 1962) is a Chinese artist whose work, which is exhibited across the world, is variously termed modern and contemporary. Whilst he cites Mondrian as a key source of inspiration and his large abstract canvases clearly relate to this period of European modern art (fig. 1), he is known in the commercial art world as a Chinese contemporary artist. The way Ding’s work is positioned and described by curators, art critics and art historians illustrates the dichotomies of local/global and modern/contemporary. His work, which is both contextually modern and internationally contemporary, demonstrates the problems of geographically specific historiographies.

The terms ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ have different meanings in the context of Chinese art history, and particularly so in relation to the Chinese art scenes of the 1980s and 1990s in which Ding began his artistic career. Gao Minglu, a Chinese art critic, argues that Chinese modernity is ‘a permanent condition of contemporaneity,’ while Xu Jiang and Gao Shiming understand it as ‘a slogan for the revitalisation of the Chinese nation.’

In the Chinese context, modern art was part of contemporary art rather than its precedent, as was the case in Europe. Yet the term modern also implied a Euro-American cultural influence. As Tong Dian stated in 1991, Chinese art cannot be independent of Western modern art, and writing five years earlier, Li Jiatun even went so far as to argue that since modern art evolved from Western humanism, it could never develop in a Chinese context.2 This suggests that modern art is a style that is intrinsically tied to European and American histories and cultures. What critics on both sides of the discussion seem to be debating is the definition of modern art: whether it is a timeless movement unconstrained by tradition, or one that relates to a period with specific socio-political values bound to geography or history.

As art production flourished in China in the 1980s and 1990s, art critics emerged as the new defining voices of Chinese art.3 Endowing themselves with authority, they critiqued, curated and theorised about the contemporary art of their day.4 These critics, whose voices became a part of art history, were negotiating the (new) position of Chinese art in relation to an international context. In this sense, their modern period of the 1980s may be characterised as a period in which China let external influences in, while their contemporary 1990s was when Chinese artists began to work outward, exhibiting in this same international space. In writing a new Chinese art history for a new China, these art criticscum-historians had their own commercial and political agendas. Many also worked as gallerists and curators. A key aspect of their Chinese art history was an emphasis on political engagement in Chinese art. The main Chinese art movements of the 1980s and 1990s were politically framed: the Stars Art Show, for example, where 23 untrained artists displayed work outside Beijing’s National Art Gallery, or the rise of apartment art as a phenomenon, posed questions about who defines national culture and the spaces needed to validate it.

As China began to engage openly with the world in the 1990s, artists and critics gained access to the international art market. Art funding, once tightly controlled by the state, made what Peggy Wang describes as an ‘axial turn’ towards the market, offering new opportunities for artists. Market reforms in 1993 and the rising popularity of Chinese ‘contemporary’ art enabled art production and art criticism to develop without official and state commissions. China’s first national auction house was founded in the 1990s, and as market prices began to rise, so did Chinese art’s perceived global relevance and its presence in scholarly discourse.

A modern Mondrian?

Ding Yi occupies an interesting position in Chinese contemporary art and art history. Rarely mentioned in surveys of Chinese contemporary art by eminent Chinese art historians such as Wu Hung,7 Ding did not publically adhere to a specific school or movement during a period of Chinese art history rife with new art groups and politics. Although he briefly aligned with the ’85 New Movement as a performance artist, Ding considered this movement too ‘disorderly’ and sought instead to empty his work of content.8 He is best known for his Appearance of Crosses series, begun in 1988 (fig. 2), and is often acclaimed as ‘one of China’s most popular and collected artists.’9 Each of the works in this series features a recurring x or + motif, intricately built up into textile-like patterns. These works appear abstract, in the sense that they do not directly depict physical reality. Their format (mostly large squares on canvas, linen or cardboard) andtitles (each is named Appearance of Crosses with a date) also relate to the media and title styles of 20th-century abstract art.

Ding’s commercial success – some works fetch as much as HKD 5 million –is on par with that of Ai Weiwei, and far exceeds prices paid for works by artists such as Huang Yong Ping.10 Although this is small fry when compared to the current market value of a Mondrian or a Picasso, it is striking that despite the minor role accorded him in current Englishlanguage historiography of Chinese art of the 1980s and 1990s, Ding’s work sells at far higher prices than that of his more renowned political peers. The market value of Ding’s work may relate in part to the medium in which he works; paintings are often perceived as more collectable, as they are easier to store and preserve, and as such have a more stable future value than conceptual art or installations.11 It may also relate to the way his work has been exhibited by Western curators and collectors, and how they have linked it to movements in Euro-American art history.

Ding first exhibited outside China in Hans van Dijk’s China Avant-Garde in 1993. Starting at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the exhibition toured Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK, showcasing fourteen Chinese artists.12 This was followed in the same year by Mao Goes Pop: China Post ’89 which toured Sydney and Melbourne, the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, also in Australia, and the 45th Venice Biennale (fig. 3).13 These shows all characterise Ding by his nationality: from Van Dijk’s survey, described disparagingly by Alexandra Munroe of the Guggenheim as the reduction of art to political critique,14 to the Triennial and Biennale, Ding’s work appeared primarily as a representation of Chinese culture.15 Ding’s work was not shown alongside artists with shared stylistic or political interests, but was assumed to relate to and be relevant in the context of ‘Chinese’ art alone.

Although Ding’s work was being used to showcase a new, more liberal China, it was side-lined within this category due to his emphatically nonpolitical approach.16 While Political Pop turned away from Euro-American modern art towards ‘the real space of Chinese existence,’17 and Chinese art in the 1990s embraced social reality and the wider contemporaneous environment,18 Ding’s work ostensibly did neither. He cited Mondrian and abstract art as his influences,19 and eschewed the explicit political radicalism and fervour with which his peers reacted against both ‘global’ (Euro-American) and local conventions and influences. As he noted in 2015, he was included in surveys of Chinese art to exemplify the nation’s diverse stylistic range, rather than for the individual interest of his work alone. Indeed, his work was often omitted from international media coverage in order to present a more uniform image of Chinese contemporary art.20

While Ding’s abstract style has been well received in the international art market, his reception in international art histories has been more limited. Shows such as Mondrian in China (1998), and more recently Bye Bye De Stijl at Utrecht’s Centraal Museum (2017-2018), presented Ding’s work solely in terms of its visual affinity to Mondrian’s abstract art. The former, again curated by Hans van Dijk, brought together Chinese artists who cited Mondrian as a principal influence. Exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the show positioned Mondrian as the ‘modern aesthetic’ that enabled Chinese artists to evolve from traditional Chinese art and life.21 The Dutch ambassador to China at the time introduced the exhibition catalogue:

‘Yet we hope that Mondrian’s struggle with lines and forms will raise an interest among the Chinese public, whose tendency to reduce the figure to abstraction comes naturally in dealing with the characters of Chinese script. In my opinion, absorbing cultural developments through the universal medium of art will enable people of different cultures to share their emotions and ideas, and thus bring them closer together.’22

I quote this at length to show how foreign collectors and curators positioned Euro-American modern art both as a premise to Chinese modern art, and as pivotal for its subsequent development. Mondrian’s work, initially politicised by Chinese artists in their movement towards artistic autonomy, is re-politicised as a form of soft power that enables the ‘Orient’ to be made more comprehensible to a European audience. The choice of words such as ‘natural’ and ‘universal’ present Mondrian as a neutral, a-cultural source of inspiration, whose work aligns with existing Chinese trends and may therefore be assumed to have preceded them. In this context, which Aihwa Ong describes as ‘the linear temporality of universalist thinking, in its guise as hegemonic globalisation,’23 Chinese modern art becomes a contemporary, and thus belated, phenomenon. Rather than presenting Chinese artists as working on the same level as Mondrian, Mondrian in China suggests a mysterious transposition of his aesthetics to explain the modernisation of Chinese culture. The ‘modern aesthetic’ of Chinese art describes a potential new history of their future work and their recent release from a ‘protracted ideological bondage.’24 In this sense, Chinese art continues to be presented as derivative of and dependent on the work of canonical Euro-American modern artists, whose aesthetic they are perceived to be borrowing, rather than adopting and adapting.

A contemporary local?

To read Ding differently, his work needs to be positioned in a contemporaneous context that considers but does not essentialise local or historical references his work makes. My reading of the local inflections of Ding’s work that follows, is therefore not an anthropological one. Rather, it is an effort to trace the potential relationships between Ding’s abstraction and his local specificities, between modern art and specific modernities. The way Ding’s work abstracts from and in specific social circumstances makes it modern in its own right, rather than belatedly so in relation to Euro-American modern art.

Ding’s work may be viewed in terms of its reference to textiles and prints of the time. In the 1980s, square geometrical prints were a novel development on locally produced floral and decorative print motifs. Often painted onto textile and sometimes cardboard (fig. 4), Ding uses repetitive patterns and textures to emphasise textile-like qualities which a Chinese viewer might readily associate with locally printed textiles. For example, his work could be related to the large shopping bags printed with an all-over tartan motif, commonly in white, blue and red, which are disparagingly referred to as ‘immigrant bags’ (fig. 5) and which were once an everyday sight in urban China.25

But what does this visual cultural connection tell us about Ding’s position as either modern or contemporary? It offers an alternative perspective to readings of Ding’s work through its art historical references alone. Ding’s use of abstract geometrical shapes at a time when other artists were working with political slogans, installation and performance, may have resulted in his work being seen as design rather than art. Given Ding’s educational background as a graduate from Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute prior to his Fine Art degree, it is interesting to speculate whether his affinity with Mondrian grew from an interest in design rather than artistic ideology, much like the way Dutch designers visually drew on Mondrian and De Stijl in the 1950s and later. Another interpretation of Appearance of Crosses relates to Ding’s background in textiles. The title is a phrase used in colour printmaking to define an area of material to be printed in full. The colours bleed beyond the crosses to ensure the material is completely covered.26 Ding’s work might therefore be viewed as a literal reference to China’s growing industrialisation and the decline of hand-painted crafts. A debateable point perhaps, but one that shows how art history needs to find a balance between contextual and material readings. Ding’s use of charcoal, chalk and other media may playfully embellish an otherwise stark or simplified cross motif (fig. 6), but to read any more into this by interpreting it as raising craft to the level of fine art or equating printing with artistic production, is a stretch.

Ding’s work has also been viewed as a response to the social circumstances in China in the 1980s. Artistic practice was considered a rebellion against ideological structures; Ding’s conscious decision to not engage in this was itself a rebellion.27 By adopting ‘repetition as a direct expression of freedom’, Ding’s crosses became structurally suggestive but free of art historical reference.28 Yet this may be too simplistic a reading. It overlooks the influences Ding cites, which include Paul C.zanne (1839-1906) and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) as well as Mondrian, and does not question whether Ding’s disengagement was an active negation of ideology or simply an outcome of how his work has come to be exhibited.29

In view of these differing perspectives, it is difficult to limit a discussion of Ding’s work to its local context or source alone. As interaction between Chinese and international artists, and between Chinese artists and the global art market, increased in the 1980s and 1990s, it became harder to identify local specificity and specific cultural interpretations. Given the way Ding discusses his work, he still seems to consider it autonomous: art as art – a highly modernist perspective. But in China, where critics have claimed that there is no historical background for a modern art movement,30 there seems to be no way Ding’s art can be considered locally for its locality.

In the transnational art world, however, Chineseness has a value, at least in market terms. Ding’s market worth is separate from his political significance. First in Christie’s list of ‘10 Chinese contemporary artists you need to know’ in 2017, Ding is highly collectible for precisely the same reasons he is elided in Chinese art history. His medium and lack of explicit political or social commentary make him highly sellable. And with market value being a form of endorsement in China’s local art scene,31 his international importance as a Chinese contemporary artist stands in striking contrast to his absence in Chinese art historiography.

A proposal

In conclusion, Ding’s oeuvre and its reception demonstrate a constant movement between the local and the purportedly global, and the Euro-American modern and the Chinese contemporary. From the contradictions inherent in his use of materials, possibly referencing textile production, abstract art and labour, to the influences he cites and the place this accords him in art historical lineages, Ding is an artist whose work can be continuously interpreted in contrasting ways.

These simultaneous and ongoing readings, considered together, highlight the tensions between international and local histories, markets and contexts. Modern art might include Ding if we contest Euro-American art history’s unique claim to the term. So too, 1980s Chinese modern art might include Ding if we consider the interests and politics of Chinese art historiography of the time: we need to be aware of who, when and how these art histories came to be written when we read them.

It is vital in this transnational art world not to assume the transnational as a given. Art histories are constructions: comparing or prioritizing particular histories is an ongoing process of translation between contexts, times and spaces. This is complicated in the case of Chinese art history by the difficulty of linguistic access, different notions of modern and politicised resistances to international and transnational influences.

In the Chinese art world, the term ‘modern art’ has a contemporary meaning, that takes on a specific position in relation to its Euro-American counterparts. To acknowledge its specificity, rather than defining it simply as art that is not from the West, we need to consider how Chinese art history challenges existing art historical narratives and their implicit Euro-American positions. These histories need to interlink if we are to reflect on the positions and politics of an artist such as Ding Yi, whose work is embedded in and references a Euro-American modern, a Chinese modern and a transnational contemporary simultaneously.

Sophie Mak-Schram is a practice-based researcher and (creative) writer who recently graduated from the Research Masters in Arts and Culture at Leiden University. Her research centres on contemporary art historiography, national and artistic identities in relation to globalisation, and temporalities in the context of divergent modernisms. She is particularly interested in the relationship between art practices and art histories.