Qian Wenzhong

Ding Yi was born in 1962 in Shanghai, six years before me. One could say we grew up in the same era. It was an era of surging winds and seas. Today it has become a very peculiar memory: a period that was never put to rest, but rather continued to pierce the thoughts and people it encompassed. This history lives on defiantly.

This time gave birth to contemporary or avant-garde art in China and a group of artists full of the spirit of independence and freedom. Among them, Ding is one of the most internationally recognized, and he continues to have deeply lasting influence.

Although I have admired Ding for some time, and have even read a few of his catalogues and essays, it still feels like we share a divine connection. I only had the pleasure of meeting him this year on February 24.

Through an introduction by Chen Jiawen, founder of “Shansha” in Shanghai and Kyoto, and accompanied by the young Shanghainese curator Liang Qin, Ding visited my cramped and cluttered study. He is gentle and elegant, and he speaks and behaves like a Western gentleman but with the air of a traditional Chinese Confucian scholar, merging the two seamlessly. As I see them, externally Ding’s works follow strict patterns. Yet in the interweaving, evading, linking, and running through of lines and colors, there lurks an interior of immense and liberated mental tension. The mysterious distance between the artist and his work was the first thing that attracted me, made me think there must be some secret karma waiting to be known.

We really hit it off. As contemporaries Ding and I have similar, maybe even the same, spiritual sources. We both have a special attachment to the sacred land of Tibet. Ding has been many times in search of what his heart longs for, and I chose Sanskrit and Buddhist culture as my lifelong study and research. In the 1980s, I went to study in what was then the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from Peking University, studying Indian and Tibetan history and culture at the University of Hamburg. Despite my background, as one who’s received a request from such an outstanding contemporary artist as Ding, I’ve tried to write a few words for the occasion of his exhibition, “Multi-verse: Ding Yi in Tibet,” based on our shared emotion. Thus, despite my fears, I did not refuse.

I am in no position to judge Chinese contemporary art. As for Ding’s artistic achievements, he has participated in hundreds of high-level exhibitions at home and abroad, and numerous publications and catalogues in Chinese and foreign languages detail his work. There’s really no need for me to put my two cents. This short piece is not written as the usual art criticism, but as a brief account of the “karma” between Ding and myself, and what I’ve realized about Ding’s special connection to Tibet. It could, perhaps, be accepted as an attempt to hide my own weakness. What’s more, I believe that visitors to Ding’s exhibitions and readers of his catalogues will establish their own “karma” with the artist.

The “secret karma” mentioned above haunts my mind. I re-read Ding’s works and treatises carefully, trying to get into the spirit of the artist and the work. I hope I can meet Ding again in some divine way. Surely, I think, Ding cannot simply be regarded as a painter. His work is not just painting, not even primarily painting. This is obviously very different from the general perception, which only serves to deepen my fear.

However, if Ding is more than just a painter, more than just a contemporary artist, then who is he? If Ding’s work is more than just painting, more than just art, then what is it?

These questions seem to lead me to some kind of “secret.” I truly feel the mental tension that this inquiry brings. It seems to be karma that’s brought me so suddenly to Ding’s “secret.”

On the night of March 4, lay Buddhist Mei Bingqiao, founder of Jin Ze Art Centre, called together a meeting. Mei’s brother-in-law, Johnson Chang, happened to be in Shanghai, so I attended. As we all know, Chang is an internationally renowned art critic and curator, as well as the founder of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong. Since the late 1980s, Chang has been dedicated to promoting Chinese avant-garde art, participating in the organization and the execution of many large-scale international art exhibitions, enhancing the world’s understanding of Chinese avant-garde art. During the dinner, we struck up a conversation about it. Chang knows Ding very well, having previously held an exhibition of his work, and he praised Ding’s artistic achievements.

I expressed the great tension I felt from Ding’s works, in particular, his lines and their interrelation which under seemingly rigid rules and order still bring a sense of freedom, breakthrough, and impact. Chang said, “What Ding wants to get rid of is the limitation and bondage of painting. His lines represent a meditative practice.”

At that moment, it suddenly dawned on me: Ding was not satisfied with figurative expression in painting, and as an outstanding artist, he longed to reach the essence or noumenon of life through art. This is a process of ridding oneself of all forms or tools that have been borrowed from one life to the next, which leads to transcendence, a direct interest in the essence of life. In a sense, whatever form of expression Ding chooses is what he ultimately seeks to transcend – just as the “Mahayana” and “Hinayana” are “chariots” carrying one to the same end. As the saying goes “like a trap after catching fish, like the words upon one’s understanding, once the means are relinquished, one achieves freedom.”

Therefore, Ding is more of a practitioner or monk. Line and color are his “chariot” or the “trap” to his “fish” or simply his “words.” Ding is not obsessive, and we the viewers should understand his unbridled freedom.

It was also this “meditative practice” that established Ding’s relationship with sacred Tibet. In Buddhist terms, this is a kind of unspeakable “correspondence.” Certainly, on the planet where we live, there is perhaps no land more relevant to “spiritual cultivation” than Tibet. The reason why Tibet is Tibet is because she possesses an almost mystical power or charm. In the seemingly inevitable conflict between pluralism and monism, inheritance and creation, fixation and transcendence, secular and sacred, traditional and modern, one can build a symbiotic harmony full of tension.

I don’t know if we realize it. Located in the closest natural environment to the sky, Tibet itself has a long and profound civilization. Uniquely situated at the intersection of ancient Indian, Iranian and Chinese civilizations, it has an inherent unique cultural gene and the elements to sustain life.

The Tibetan language, which belongs to the same Sino-Tibetan language family as Chinese, actually uses the Indian alphabet. Around 1,300 or 1,400 years ago, at the command of the Tibetan king Songtsan Gampo, Thonmi Sambhota was sent to study ancient Indian script. After returning to Tibet, his learnings were combined with ancient Shangshung cultural factors to create classical Tibetan.

When Nalanda Temple, where Xuanzang and other eminent monks had studied, faced destruction, another Tibetan student carried an aged Dharma master on his back, retreating to Tibet.

If we go to the Kham region, such as Garzê in Sichuan province, in Dawu you can hear people still telling stories about their Mongolian ancestors. If we linger in Kangding, city of love songs, and walk out the door of the Gesar Hotel, across the road looms a solemn Christian church.

The charm of Tibet lies in the uniqueness and richness of its culture, and more importantly in her ability to make modern people think deeply about life/afterlife, traditionalism/modernism, foreign/local, appearance/origin. And these questions clearly fascinate contemporary artists.

Ding is a representative figure of contemporary Chinese abstract art dedicated to the abstract expression of the spiritual world, breaking through the bewildering outward appearances of this world, expressing the metaphysics of images or even primordial elements. It is a meditative practice that is always his own. I can see that for Ding, Tibet is a defining coincidence. It is also a fated coincidence.

On his recent return from Tibet, the question that haunted Ding was how to express Tibetan culture macroscopically and abstractly. “Multi-verse” chooses the field expressed by nature and culture. From nature, he chose his subject – Everest at night – and his mediums – paper and wood. It was Ding’s choice in color that describes the structure of Mount Everest, its infinite layers of whiteness. From culture, Ding selected objects of belief from murals: King Kong, Guanyin and the mandala. His dialogue with them is equivalent to a faith that transcends religion.

I suspect that Ding also felt what he calls “purity,” “suspension” and “silence” in this kind of meditative practice. Strangely enough, all of these are present in the completed images.

I think if I finally met Ding again, the encounter would belong to a very rare form of karma.

“Multi-verse” is curated by the honorable 15th Living Buddha Tenzin·Ngawang Gyaltsen-Rinpoche. Rinpoche studied at Fudan University where I worked. This is a wonderful karma, which stirs my sincerest admiration.

There’s a passage in Tang dynasty poet Han Wo’s Zeng Ying: “Even with the lamp of wisdom burned out, its light still shines over the ten directions.” I wish the solo exhibition “Multi-verse: Ding Yi in Tibet” every success and good luck.

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Multi-Verse: Ding Yi in Tibet