An artist is always on the front line, at the crossroads of history […] I think we had good times for about thirty years, and now it’s over. What follows will be thirty years of not-so-good times, but an artist can still create.1

Ding Yi

I was in China for the first time in the winter of 1997, undertaking research for my Biennale of Sydney, due to open the following September. I met artists in studios, rough and ready, often converted industrial spaces without central heating—so cold in Beijing!—but the welcomes could not have been warmer. It was exciting to share thoughts with these thirty- somethings, hailing from the generation that had grown up fast through the world- changing events of 1989. The Chinese art world, more or less suppressed for the two years that followed, was opening up, especially to the West. By 1993 ten Chinese artists had been selected for the Venice Biennale, eight for the first Asia- Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (see p. 208), and group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art were starting to proliferate internationally. Surely this was more evidence that we really were witnessing “the end of history.”

Ding Yi was a popular choice for those early post-1989 exhibitions featuring Chinese artists. In 1993 alone, he was not only at Venice and APT but was also included in the China’s New Art, Post-1989 exhibition at Hong Kong Arts Centre and China Avant- Garde at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (see p. 207). The latter was curated by Hans van Dijk, Dutch and an extraordinarily seminal figure in the development of contemporary Chinese art and who died much too young. He was the one who introduced me to Ding Yi in that Chinese winter and I was immediately struck by the clarity and aesthetic appeal of this artist’s work.

Ding Yi, as now, was based in Shanghai. I clearly remember my newfound friends in Beijing bemused by my decision to include him in the Sydney Biennale. Uppermost in their minds was the problem of his abstraction and the difficulty of “reading” his work. As much as I liked their conceptualist propositions, I was also drawn to a kind of smart dumbness, which could be observed not only in the work of Ding Yi but also in that of others such as Katharina Grosse and Bernard Frize, exemplifying a vital aspect of the “everyday” theme of my biennale. I was keen to counteract an over- theorized (Western) postmodernism, and Ding Yi’s resistance to contrived meaningfulness was just what I was looking for.

Those were the “Tartan” days. Ding Yi was painting his (appearances of) crosses onto tartan fabric rather than artistically conventional canvas. His was an unpretentious use of ready- made material, playing off the patterned weave with its small repetitive gestures, no- nonsense and yet aspiring to a condition of meditation—through counting time—and existentialist in its implication of the artist’s actual presence through the traces of brush strokes. It was as beautiful as it was unreadable.

In a fax to the Biennale office, reporting on my time in China, I wrote that there were four artists we wanted: Ding Yi—“a painter, largish works approx 2×2 m, abstract repetitive grid- like patterns. Lives in Shanghai, represented by Hans van Dijk (who, incidentally, I liked very much)”—Zhang Peili, Zhao Bandi, and Zhu Jia. Now, toward the end of my selection of artists for the Biennale, my mind was full of possible correspondences, and in the event, Ding Yi was shown in the company of Aboriginal artist Margaret Robyn Djunginy’s woven sculptures, Pacific Sister Ani O’Neill’s crochet, the Euro- minimalism of Perry Roberts, and the Tropicana- inspired paintings of Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes. The art/craft conflation was very important to me—there was a lot of weaving—and so too the internationalism. Ding Yi was colliding with the Global South as much as with the West.

Those were the days! Days suffused with our naivety. The future we were then envisaging was going to resemble an advertisement for the United Colors of Benetton. Black, white, and various shades of brown, we were all going to live together, happily ever after.

The Shanghai Biennale of 2000, curated by a team led by Hou Hanru, was the first international exhibition of contemporary art in China. It was also very much of its time, sharing in the happy zeitgeist, and crossovers with my Sydney Biennale included Zhang Peili, Bernard Frize, On Kawara, and a number of Australian Aboriginal artists. Strangely enough, Ding Yi was not on the Shanghai Biennale list; instead, he was busy helping to organize an unofficial satellite exhibition, curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, entitled Fuck Off. This expletive was not aimed at the Biennale organizers, nor intended as a rejection of the internationalism that they espoused, but rather a deliberately rough translation of the exhibition’s Chinese title, Buhezuo fangshi, meaning “ways of non- cooperation.” It was an assertion of independence against institutional authority, as explained in a short introduction: “A cultural attitude that stands against power and makes no compromise with vulgarization is, together with independent individual experiences, feelings and creations, is [sic.] what extends the pursuit and desire of art for spiritual freedom—an everlasting theme.”

Much of the work in Fuck Off was sensationalist—hardcore, sometimes visceral in the extreme, politically blunt (with at least one depiction of Hitler), and not at all shy of nudity and sex—while Ding Yi’s contribution was characteristically subtle. It consisted of industrial white wax, melted and mixed with white plastic tile spacers—small cross shapes—and then cooled to make One Cubic Meter. It was a minimalist sculpture, embodying Ding Yi’s signature symbol en masse, exhibited in the studio where it was made, surrounded by the tools and other equipment that he had used to make it. Ding Yi’s composition of white-on- white only served to foil the overall political incorrectness of Fuck Off, and the exhibition was closed down after two days. The Shanghai Biennale, on the other hand, carried on as a regular event in the Chinese art calendar, under the aegis of the Shanghai Art Museum, and I was invited to be part of the curatorial team for the 2006 edition. The year before I curated Ding Yi’s first solo exhibition in the UK, at Ikon Gallery. I visited Shanghai many times during the first years of the new millennium and it was a pleasure being there. It was not only the enjoyment of being part of the lively exchange between local artistic communities and a wider world, but also the feeling of a society becoming more open—in a distinctly Chinese way, without caving in to Western influence. We reveled in the cultural difference. It was easy to move around.

The insistence on cash, not card transactions, was a hurdle easily overcome, and hard work was counterbalanced by “hard” play. The latter, for me, was epitomized by the Y. Y. (Ying Yang) Club on Nanchang Road. Run by Kenny, from Hong Kong, it was a filmic experience with lights low and waiters dressed in light suits with fedoras. Kenny could be seen leaning out of a window onto the street, smoking a joint, when he wasn’t giving a tour of his collection of Mao memorabilia in the basement. The Y. Y., reminiscent of the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1920s, never seemed to close. I sometimes met Ding Yi there, in the company of other artists. He was feeling positive about Shanghai and his work during those years reflected this. He had decided that his paintings prior to 1998, the year of the Sydney Biennale, were too introspective, too dark—like old Shanghai—and that they should have the color of the city as it has become, lit up at night. Hence, the “Fluorescents,” as he explains:

The period around 1998 was the most rapid phase of development in Shanghai. At the time, the city began lighting projects and became immersed in bright light of the elevated highways and high rises. The buildings, which grew taller and taller, afforded more opportunities to overlook the city, which glittered with colors of neon … So from 1999 I started utilizing quite a lot fluorescent, metallics, and even luminous paint on the tartan, which was also painted with a layer of fluorescent color … My fluorescent series addressed the urban progress of Shanghai, with an unspoken indication to all cities in China.2

Ding Yi’s Ikon exhibition was a judicious survey of work from 1989 until 2005, a neat journey through the “Tartans” to the “Fluorescents.” Around this time he accepted the invitation to join in with the 2006 Shanghai Biennale and his contribution there made his interest in the city even more explicit. Instead of paintings, he exhibited Time- Space Post Office, a set of brightly colored wall- based sculptures with horizontal surfaces on which visitors could write answers to a questionnaire he had drawn up. What did they think? “How big should the city be?” “What is more important: environment, family, career, wealth, freedom or public services?” “What should the role or function of contemporary art be?” “Are you proud of the condition of Chinese culture in areas such as politics, sports, soccer, cinema, theater, architecture, design, painting, sculpture, or cooking?” After being posted into the central red box- like sculpture, completed questionnaires were stuck to the wall behind so that visitors to the Biennale could read each other’s hopes for the future. Shanghai was looking forward to Expo 2010, but before then there was going to be China’s coming out party, the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008. It seems extraordinary now that Ai Weiwei, a curator of Fuck Off, would have been invited to join the design team of the National Stadium—the Bird’s Nest—as artistic consultant, but then it was yet another positive sign, suggesting a post-Olympics legacy of relaxed rules and tolerance. Ding Yi looks back, wistfully:

The optimism continued throughout that time reaching its peak in 2008, when the Olympics were held. That’s why many of Ai Weiwei’s actions were still possible despite the confrontation. But today it is no longer possible. Our society is deteriorating. By 2008, I actually felt that I could no longer paint the life of this city with passion […] That’s why I stopped using fluorescent colors in 2010 and started to shift to black and white.

It was as if a dream was over, and the transformation of China into the country we know now—less open, more regulated and aggressively nationalistic—had begun. Ding Yi describes his process of painting at that time as analogous:

When I was ready to [put down] the fluorescent red base color on my canvas, in order to start working, my mind went blank. What did I want to paint? Then one word popped up: “chaos.” So, between 2008 and 2010, I started to dismantle my compositions, normally rhythmic and expansive, and they became chaotic.

The color was turned down, and then disappeared altogether.

In a recent exhibition catalog, Ding Yi summarizes his artistic career by dividing it into three parts. The first was “Steadying,” during which he developed the “Appearance of Crosses,” up until 1998, when the tartans were in full swing. Then came the “Overlooking” of 1998–2010: “My practice moved from formalism towards an attention to social issues, looking for a macroscopic abstract language […] as a response to the visual stimuli of the period, real and unreal, reason and sensibility, forming a contradiction of order in an era of agitated expansion.”3 Then, finally, “Looking Up”: “Since 2010, I started to look up at the sky, the universe and the larger world with black- and- white works as a transition.”4 It was as if the bright lights of Shanghai had prevented Ding Yi from seeing the stars: “… I felt that the fluorescent colors were not sustainable”—and that he was working out a way of transcending the politics that had let him down. The story of recent Chinese contemporary art is one of innocence and experience. Thanks to a booming economy, successful Chinese artists like Ding Yi now enjoy a lifestyle that was unimaginable in 1997. They have large, comfortable studios, (electric) cars instead of bikes and scooters, and a digital culture concentrated into smartphones—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—but, without exception, they have lost the hope they once had of independence and freedom being taken for granted. Ai Weiwei’s experience, post-2008, epitomizes the volte- face. He is now in exile. I have met many other Chinese artists who remain, often showing me work on laptops—smart, informed, satirical—that probably will not see the light of day in their own country during their life times. Ding Yi, as ever, avoids the ideological or sensationalist—“hooligan”—tendencies that he has witnessed advancing and receding in Chinese art throughout his career, and his work continues to evolve out of an aesthetic that he “steadied” for himself many years ago. It couldn’t be more far- reaching:

I have traveled to many third world countries and felt that they are the cradles of ancient human civilizations, such as Ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, India, Arabia and Africa. They all experienced glorious periods of prosperity and are part of the world as a whole. Therefore, I have integrated history, politics and humanities into the thinking of my practice, and shifted from a bipolar worldview oscillating between China and the West, to one incorporating more civilizations and regions.5

Just as Ding Yi moved on from preoccupations of the studio and the formalism that went with them, since 2010 he has been concerned to decouple his work from a local, current social reality in order to convey broader, more philosophical considerations. His pursuit of what is essential in humanity, through ancient and indigenous cultures—long before art was invented—goes hand in hand with a profound appreciation of our natural world and what lies beyond it. Recently, Ding Yi has been making work inspired by journeys taken to remote places, most notably in Tibet. He writes about time spent at the base camp of Mount Everest as being “particularly sacred. Everything is silent… I felt kind of suspended. I couldn’t tell if I was at the the foot of Everest or out in space.”6 Such an experience has been distilled into a number of paintings of configurations of crosses that delineate the serrated horizons of mountain ranges, above which we see a starry sky.

Other recent works, that similarly could not be less urban, include Heavenly Oceanly (2022), a series of digital prints that effectively and variously, suggest seascapes. Also, the Constellations. These paintings are like patches of night sky, with white crosses connected by fine straight lines in the astronomical game of join- the- dots that gives rise to discernible constellations. Ding Yi was working on a new series of these the last time I visited his studio. Outside was the street life of Shanghai; too many people bent over smartphones and fewer foreign tourists because China is not much fun these days. Kenny left the Y. Y. Club a long time ago. Ding Yi, meanwhile, carries on—not oblivious to what is happening around him by any means, but intent on looking up at the stars.

1

Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the artist are from an unpublished conversation I had with him in April 2024.

2

Ding Yi, “Overlooking,” in Multiverse: Ding Yi in Tibet, exhibition catalog (Lhasa: Jebum- Gang Art Center and Shide Space, 2022), 173.

3

Ibid., 171.

4

Ibid., 189.

5

Ibid., 189.

6

Ibid., 49.

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