16 March,2022 14:00-17:00

At Ding Yi Studio

S (Sheng Liyu): This is your third trip to Tibet. Can you tell us about your three trips?

D (Ding Yi): In 1989, I stayed in Lhasa for only one week and then took a shuttle bus to Shigatse. A few of my friends were going back to Lhasa, and I was going to Tingri, to Everest, so I started a solo trip. When I arrived at Tingri, I was told I needed a pass from the mountaineering association to go to Everest. The pass can only be issued in Lhasa, so there was no way to really go. I had to change my schedule and go to Zham. That trip was my first understanding of Tibet, and it shocked me greatly. Regardless of whether was the culture, the religion, or the ordinary Tibetan people. I was young with a backpack. I was down to earth and wanted to dive in and observe.

The second time was three years ago. Back in 1989, there was no way to get to Ngari because there was no real public transport and even the road maps were not clear. Three years ago, I wanted to realize my dream of going to Ngari. I arrived there by plane from Lhasa and stayed for a week. But I was not satisfied at the time. I hadn’t been able to see the Guge ruins because they were being refurbished. I had regretfully only been able to see Mount Kailash from afar, without any chance to do a circumambulation.

Last winter I went to Tibet for the third time. This was a more in-depth experience. Different monasteries, the native people, Everest base camp. It also included meeting many people from cultural and art circles, and let me understand Tibet in a diversified way. These three trips to Tibet may not have been enough for creative practice, but compared to my first trip to Tibet, my mind got to thinking. When I went to Tibet in 1989, I didn’t paint a picture there. Abstract art had not yet become a tool of thought for me. The mainstream of Tibetan painting at that time was similar to Chen Danqing’s “Tibetan Paintings” – This kind of painting was a breakthrough, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I refuse to paint with such feelings, but at the time, I didn’t have my own specific language. So I didn’t paint anything.

S: The end of November is not a good time to go to Everest. Did you fear altitude sickness, natural disasters, or unpredictability on the road?

D: No.

S: You are sixty years old this year, which is a special time for Chinese people. Why choose such a time to go to Tibet?

D: I don’t think about these things. I don’t like to look for these coincidences to do something. I just know that creatively I’m at my best right now.

S: Can you describe your feeling on Mount Everest? It was negative ten degrees and 5,200 meters above sea level.

D: Maybe it was the excitement of arriving at base camp that overwhelmed everything. There was no lack of oxygen or discomfort at the time. When night fell, the biggest feeling was the silence. Everything else became secondary. My steps were light, and I no longer knew the boundary between truth and self-judgment. I didn’t know where I was – at the foot of Mount Everest or in space. I felt a little suspended. I didn’t seem to have any other traces of everyday life in my mind.

All the darkness set off the whiteness of Everest – not the whiteness of sunlight, but structured whiteness, infinite layers of whiteness. The structure of the mountain is strange, and there is something unspeakable about it.

In the hustle and bustle of the city, this feeling cannot be repeated, but in the quiet of the studio at night, that state can be constantly recalled. That moment is deeply moving, and will stay in the mind’s eye for a long time.

S: You have said that you have no particular religious beliefs. Did you have any religious feelings when you went to Mount Everest?

D: It’s a similar feeling to when you’re in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, facing Michelangelo’s La Pieta. Five hundred years on, religion may be fading, but the transcendent art of Michelangelo’s work will still shock you.

S: Do these physical and emotional memories come back in your work?

D: I would be more interested in locating that physical aspect. From plateau to plain, back to the altitude of Shanghai, you feel an addiction, though not always pleasant. It’s like my love of espresso. You need something like that in your system. It’s not pleasant, but it could be what your body craves.

S: The way you create is very similar to the way one paints a tanka, which requires a lot of physical effort. You mentioned clearing the mind while creating, which is also a spiritual state of Tibetan temperament. Can you describe the psychological feeling of your recent creative period?

D: These days, there is only one thing on my mind: Tibet. It’s been a very immersive period of production, and I have been working on it every day during the Spring Festival. Constantly thinking about how to express my ideas on Tibet has been very rewarding. It felt like a fog at first. Like I was never sure, but now I think I’ve managed to grasp something. Especially late at night, in the studio space, there is only the relationship between you and the painting, the body and the painting. During the long working hours, I often listen to Himalayan FM, and recently I have listened to all the things in the Tibet label on the platform. During my long working hours, I often listen to Himalaya FM, and recently I’ve listened to all the things labeled with Tibet on the platform.

Sometimes creativity can be like starting a computer program: if you don’t finish, it’s like the program didn’t finish. This color goes all the way around, and sometimes it takes another two hours – so you continue to work for another two hours. There’s an expectation that if I draw for two more hours, it’s like I’m two hours closer to the truth. You can have a grasp of wholeness, of control over something, but it’s still unknown. The search for the unknown does not end until the picture is presented. You shape the soul of the painting with your own behavior, and only when you immerse yourself in it will the soul of the painting emerge.

Time is very limited. In principle you can not waste a single day, so as to ensure that no painting fails. Try it on paper first, and then if you discover something, bring it to the canvas or wood panel. So the whole creative process is full of adventure. When the latest mandala painting was actually in its final stage, on the last night, that’s when you felt the picture was almost finished. You could feel it all the time that it was possible for the painting to fail. Because mandalas are decorative, they are likely to lose vitality, to lose a sense of movement and become lifeless paintings.

In this process, one can only anticipate the trend. It doesn’t initially unfold as you do. It was an interesting process, and some kind of dialogue with Tibet took place.

S: Could you talk about the methodology of this creative production?

D: In facing Tibet creatively, it seems this first exhibition would come too soon. I kept thinking: if I had two years, I might be able to express Tibet better. In the current time limit, the language can only be continuously compressed to focus on two parts. One is the dialogue with faith; the other is the dialogue with nature. The latter focuses on Everest, and further, on Everest at night. This theme is interpreted by seven paintings, on paper and wood. There are images as well as abstraction. The part on religious culture mainly studies the murals, hoping to form a dialogue with the murals, and also focuses on a relatively small scope. Three different materials were used: paper, canvas and wood. Mineral pigments from Tibet were also used. Through these materials, I kept looking for new possibilities and reached a tacit understanding with Tibet in terms of the material.

What has been troubling me since I came back is how to express Tibet and Tibetan culture in abstract language. One is color; one is image; and one is material. At first, I tried the small squares, the combination of black and white, the combination of colors, which is also the image of a Tibetan temple. These little squares, which later become larger squares, add up to explore the iconification of religion within these structures. If we go back to early abstraction, Malevich or Mondrian, there was an attempt at this kind of, you might say, abstract fundamentalism. When faced with such profound cultural factors as Tibet, I think it might be a way to go back to this original state of thinking. But this alone was not enough, so it later developed into a series of more intense colors.

S: For these works, you used Tibetan paper and mineral pigments. How do they challenge the painting process?

D：The paper I previously used was handmade in France and England. Tibetan paper production has more folk craft ingredients. The material and thickness are not the most stable, but it carries Tibetan cultural connections. It felt like the beginning of a dialogue with Tibet. I bought a lot of mineral pigments and gels, like bone glue. Mineral pigments are bags of pigment powder. You can mix it into a gel, but I don’t think you have to go into the material in a conventional way. So what I’m doing now is I’m sifting the paint over the paper with a sieve and then spraying glue to fix it. The paint turns into a mist. This chaos is instructive. You figure out some kind of path and direction in it.

In the past, my creative production was planned and deductive. Now this new method of expression can regulate the state of creation production. I also used a lot of pastel, charcoal, pencils. Because of your knowledge of Tibet, the usual material would change. The strength and brightness would also change. When the structure is controlled to optimum condition, there will be intensity. This one, for example, I think could be called “King Kong.”

S: Do you have any expectations for such an exhibition?

D: I have an uncertain mind: how will Tibetan artists feel? Will they find it interesting? Are my positions and perspectives illuminating or controversial? This I think is the most important to me.

Because of Tibet, I am also thinking about the “locality” of painting. I even wonder if every major exhibition in the future should reflect more of your local experience of the area.

S: You once said, “Let go of the confusion of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ by using clear, pure expression,” but also, “I must admit my skepticism about pure visual language as the ultimate goal.” For you, are symbols self-contained expressions of truth? If art can point to truth, how does your work relate to truth?

D: Both statements were made thirty years ago. I regard them as early declarations, as means to support my own creative practice in the face of the contemporary Chinese art scene at that time. Today, for me, there is no need for such declarations. After more than thirty years of creative practice, what matters today is what you can really find, something that is truly close to its essence. You want to get closer and closer to the hands of God, in your creation and accumulation of vision, so that you can vaguely see these hands before your eyes. But this is achieved by a long process, not through a declaration.

S: What do you think about the essence of art?

D: This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps to generalize its possibilities: does it offer a new, something spiritual, or respond to the paradigm of a certain time? Or can images be timeless and reach some more permanent state?

It can be said that art 200 years ago was completely dependent on religion, while today’s art is more independent. However, there are also problems in our age. That is, the influence of commerce and the general public. So there is still no way for it to be truly independent, truly free. Increasingly, images have some kind of temporal problem. What we resist today is mainstream convergence, the oppression of the mainstream. Never before in our history have art galleries and museums flourished like today. Art affects the vision of ordinary people and young people. Such a model means that the invisible global thrust of art has to be addressed to different levels of people. Originally this incurred a simpler structure: Perhaps a Pope, a nobleman, or a king of a principality would exert influence and judgment on art. All these systems have been reorganized today. The systems of development for artists has changed, and the problems are more complicated. In such a context, what the artist believes has become more important. The ability to resist these convergences, to predict some future possibilities, has become more important.

S: Many years ago, it was said that painting was finished and that art had entered the era of multi-media. Where does your confidence in painting and singular symbol come from?

D: The truth of art is most important, and the form itself is simply the way. Every artist has his own language that he can use. For me, I am good at graphic art and painting, and I like to work alone in the quiet of the night. I am not a star artist, but an individual artist immersed in my work. I think this is the most physically comfortable reason for me to use painting.

Of course, an artist should be keen to find new materials and new media, and this time there will be a video work exhibited in Tibet. The essence of this work is my current understanding of the universe.

S: Hou Hanru says you are “probably the most ideological painter.” At this stage, do you think ideology is still important for painting?

D: I don’t really care about that stuff anymore. Hou Hanru spoke about the whole face of Chinese contemporary art around 2000. Since 1993, Chinese contemporary art has been on tour around the world, and its whole appearance is quite ideological. Pop and hooligan art. Meanwhile, I am often the only one working in abstraction. Perhaps a particularly non-ideological thing turns out to be the most ideological thing.

Personal judgment is increasingly important today. If we look at the history of art, after the 1980s so-called “art schools” disappeared. In the 1980s, graffiti art in New York, Nouvelle Figuration in France, Neo-Expressionism in Germany, and the Transavantgarde in Italy, these cultural phenomena resonated globally. Since the 1980s, there have been no such waves. Emerging regions start to come alive; traditional areas began to weaken. The idea of contemporary art shapes the convergence of places. As the West experienced a period of colonial introspection, there was an even greater need for the creative energies other cultures in order to restart that of the West. In the last century, we saw the influence of African art and Japanese Ukiyo-e on the West. This process has led to the political correctness of art to this day. Like the emphasis on women’s identity at this year’s Venice Biennale – the corresponding Pompidou exhibition will also come to the West Bund. Another example is the work of African-American artists. We can see galleries and art museums around the world doing exhibitions of artists with specific identities. From this point of view, the ideology of art is also changing. There is also the effect of capital – often capital is quick to follow. But I still wonder what will be left of this mainstream trend after thirty or fifty years?

S: The contemporary art we are faced with, in essence, is still a Western-centric contemporary art. You have experienced the whole of Chinese contemporary art, from its germination to its prosperity, as well as the rise of China in modern times. If there is a version of contemporary art rooted in the spirit of Eastern culture, what should it be like?

D: I don’t think there is one yet. What’s the difference between our department stores and those in Germany? Over-advocating this “Eastern-ness” is actually out of touch with reality. Its legitimacy is questionable. But we can also look back at 250 years of American history. How did it become the center of world art? It was actually achieved with a new cultural and artistic program. Hollywood, Disney, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Andy Warhol: these are the national strategy for American cultural values, And then they were sent around the world. So I often wonder why China can’t introduce a new concept of culture, one related to this era, one that transcends ideology and has universal value?

Chinese traditions need to be re-energized. The main thing is to create new systems and values that resonate across cultures. Sometimes I think to myself, Wechat and Alipay are examples of technology that has no border. The same goes for culture. You need to have systems like this to have a future.

Similarly importing the concept of contemporary art from the West, Japan and South Korea, in facing the mainstream of Western art, have mined their own national character, producing Mono-ha and Dansaekhwa, producing new knowledge from the excavation of traditional culture. Japan toured Europe in the 1950s with Japanese calligraphy and painting, implementing the idea of a Post-War reset, using cultural tactics to improve Japan’s image of defeat. The first generation of Chinese contemporary artists who went to the West, like Zao Wou-Ki who went to France in the 1940s, or Huang Yong Ping, Cai Guoqiang and Tan Dun who all went abroad in the 1980s, they found something traceable from the Chinese tradition, and formed a link with mainstream Western contemporary art. But do artists studying or living abroad today have such a cultural stance? There seems to be none.

S: If you could choose a contemporary artist to spend a day with, who would it be?

D: Louise Bourgeois. In her works, we can feel the pursuit of artistic essence, the grasp of human nature, and the very accurate use of various materials. Her work blows my mind.

S: Any other wishes for the upcoming exhibition?

D: I have one big hope and wish: I must return to Tibet again. Not for the opening of the exhibition, of course, but for a deeper return. Maybe this creation is just the beginning.

Relate Posts

Appearance of Crosses 2022-3

Multi-Verse: Ding Yi in Tibet

Multi-Verse : Ding Yi In Tibet