Marcel Duchamp and And Warhol are big news in China, like everuwhere else. But Ding Yi wanted to talk about Maurice Utrillo, famous for his legendary alcoholism as much as for his paintings of Montmartre street scenes.

Utrillo was the biggest influence on Ding Yi’s formative years as an artist.

I am wide-eyed with amazement. Did I hear right? He says it again. Utrillo? But why? “Because,” Din Yi says, “what he showed us of Paris looked very much like the Shanghai of my formative years, or at least Hangkou in Xuhui district. By imitating him and painting Shanghai so that it resembled his Paris, my technique improved.” He glances up as if to check the impact his words have had on me. The look on my face must be priceless: I can’t believe my ears. I ask if he has kept any of these paintings or any reproductions. Yes, he has some copies. View of Dalian Street (1983) and Street with Red Houses (1983) are, as he said, Utrillo with a Chinese twist. They have the same naivete, meticulously analuzed, drawn, and colored.

We are in a studio at 50 Moganshan Road, in the same street as the three major galleries: Eastlink, Shanghart, and BizArt. Ding Yi has been working here for two years, but from the look of the studio, he could have been here forever: the shelves are stacked with neat rows of little paint pots; there is an old table down the middle of what was formerly a tailor’s workshop. Ding Yi is sitting on an old Qing chair. He is rather short and is dressed in black, as always. He has five o’clock shadow. His hair, black as his glasses, is long.

He was born in 1962 and was thus four when the Cultural Revolution began, in an atmosphere that he says was “very heavy.” There were paintings of Mao and propaganda posters everywhere—including just outside his house. Every year, artists were sent to renew the paintings on the bulletin boards. “That’s how I began to want to paint pictures,” he says. “I was at primary school, where there were no art lessons at all. I copied comics and did quite a good job. In my class, my school friends told me that I was talented. I was good at art. But back then, no one knew anything about art or Chinese painting, and even less about foreign art. What did it mean to say someone was talented?”

Several people have told me that. in those days, often the only available means or artistic expression was drawing on blackboards in chalk. That is how the young Ding Yi began. He told me how in each classroom, there were two blackboards—one for the teacher, and the other for the children to write and draw on. Actually, the children’s blackboard was reserved for the most talented children who supplied the drawings for the whole class. It was the same in high school. Only a very few students used the children’s blackboard. They felt it to be a real privilege, as it meant they were dispensed from politics class. Ding Yi smiles at the memoru. “It was a real pleasure.” he laughs.

In his third year of high school. the students decided to start an arts club. That is when Ding Yi set his heart on becoming an artist. He studied at the Shanghai School of Fine Art, specializing in design, like many other young artists. He painted in his free time.

He had a family relative who worked in Japan, whom he asked to send him art magazines, catalogs, and books, on Maurice Utrillo in particular.

In those days, there were close political ties between China and the USSR. China was heavily influenced by its vast neighbor—even in terms of art. Those were the days of Socialist Realism. At the same time, China was slowly opening up to the West. The process was tortuously slow. In 1978, the most daring exhibition was a collection of Impressionist landscapes from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It’s hard to believe today, but this exhibition had an enormous impact on an entire generation of artists. “It was the first time we had seen a large exhibition. And finally, there in front of us, we discovered European art.” Ding Yi remembers fondly.

It was a breakthrough, but a very isolated one. In 1979, a European-style exhibition was banned. But too late: the dam had been breached. The younger generation began to experiment with new ways of creating art. Information was flooding in from all sides and new directions were being explored. Five or six years later, new artistic groups were flourishing all over China.

By now, it was 1983–84. Ding Yi recalls, “In those days, every exhibition had a political dimension and they all took place on one of the many national festivals: May 1, Labor Day, or August 1 the holiday celebrating the founding of the Red Army, or October 1, the national holiday. When I went to these exhibitions. I saw that my own level was much better.”

1984, 1985, and 1986 were vital years for art and artists in China. Prior to that, information was scarce, or nonexistent. But in the mid-1980s, artists became impatient and began kicking against the constraints, trying out a whole range of new styles.

Ding Yi tells me, “There was a peculiar atmosphere in Shanghai. Although there were art schools everywhere, there was simply nothing new happening. Back then, Shanghai was very quiet, very calm—the opposite of today.”

Like so many other artists. Ding Yi began with performances. He shows me a few photoqraphs of these. Doesn’t he have any slides? He gives me a sad smile. “Back then, we were very poor.”

In 1986, one of his first performances was to wrap a long stretch of bright yellow cotton around two people sitting on a bench. Of course, in China, yellow is traditionally associated with religion; it was the color worn by the king. The performance took place outside the newly built Shanghai art museum. “Yes, it was new, but it represented tradition, while I represented modernity.” he says.”The performance was planned not so much as a dialogue as a confrontation.” I point out that, actually, he was wrapping things just like Christo. Yes, that’s true, he laughs.

He also talked to me about the influence of Fernand Léger, which, I must say, was not apparent to me in his works. He says, “This influence certainly exists. In the 1930s, Léger painted workers and machines. Maybe that was what marked me to begin with. In those days, I was influenced by a lot of people, but none of them proved to be decisive ”

The first series of Appearance of Crosse dates back to 1989. To begin with, his paintings were cold, impersonal, industrial, based on his design experience. His inspirations were Mondrian and Stella. His use of abstraction is based on his character, his artistic judgment, and his own personal history. Abstract art is rather uncommon in China. He tells me how after his studies, he began working for a toy company. “Three years later, in 1986, I decided to leave the company and go back to studying painting. I chose to specialize in Chinese painting.” Why? “Because I had seen how, in the 1930s, the contact between Chinese and European art had given rise to some very interesting developments. I knew quite a lot about European art, but very little about Chinese art. It was the opportunity I had been waiting for to learn more about this domain, and to counterbalance the influence of European art.”

So Ding Yi began to studying Chinese art in 1987. He made a fundamental discovery: “I realized that this artistic style did not correspond to the modernity of contemporary Chinese society. I was unsettled by this. I didn’t know what to do or how to find mu way out of the maze. I decided to forget everything I had ever learned on both the European and Chinese sides and to explore a completely different route.”

A return to first principles. In 1988 and 1989, he worked on a combination of art and design, with shapes drawn with a ruler that were to become the crosses of the series Appearance of Crosse. Ding Yi says, “In these works, I simply reject all sentiment, all feeling, all trembling in the fingers.” In the work he shows me, thin strips of white and gray cross at right angles on a blue background. The strips change color at the point where they meet and form a neutral pattern of quadrilaterals on the canvas.

The cross is a very simple shape: two lines crossing at right angles. It is really an allover covering of a colored background. “The cross is simply the basic element of composition of my works,” he says. “The cross is what gives the image of abstraction.”

Crosses immediately call Malevich and Beuys to mind. Does he feel he owes them anything? No. No more than he does the repetitive activities of the 1970s. “It might look repetitive, but in my mind, it’s actually an augmentation. It’s not the same
thing. Buddhists do the same thing when they pray with beads.”

Would it be accurate to talk of an American influence through their design on the one hand, and the impersonal aspect on the other? “No. Back then, in China, the fashionable styles were Expressionism and Surrealism, two schools where emotions play an important role. What I did was in opposition to that.”

From 1991 onward, there are signs of a slight development in his work, a first move away from the very minimalist style, but without quite turning his back on his rejection of the excessive emotionalism of Expressionism. “I was trying to recreate a kind of industrial precision.” he says. “But at that time, I started to question the value of this precision. Technical precision does not imply precision of thought. So then, while you might note that the lines are, say, a little clumsy, you can still tell that the spirit is perfectly precise. That’s the important thing.”

His artistic vision moved onto a higher plane in 1997, when he discovered a new material: tartan. Tartan is characterized by its lines, pattern, and colors. “I took advantage of what this industrial product had to offer.” he says. He began painting crosses over tartan, sometimes following the patterns, sometimes going against them, sometimes echoing them. In 1997 and 1998, he always left a margin to showcase the cloth used as a background.

In the first works, we can see that he used chalk to trace out his crosses. Is this the influence of the blackboards he drew on as a child? “I can see why you might think so, but it’s not the case.” he says. And very quickly, he changed style. “For three years, it was a real challenge. I created about a hundred works of art, each in a different style.” His current choice of colors is bright fluorescents shades.

In 1998, at the second Shanghai Biennale, he met an art teacher from Vancouver. The two started chatting. The Canadian told him that Shanghai today is a lot like Paris in the 1920s or 1930s, but that modern artists do not seem to go with the modern Shanghai. In 1920s and 1930s Paris, artists painted the city they saw around them. In Shanghai, artists seem very keen to keep their distance from the city. “This notion had a very strong impact on me.” Ding Yi says in an intense voice.

He told himself that he had to connect his art to the period he was living in. His first decision was to move from his studio in the suburbs to one right in the heart of Shanghai:”The better to feel the city, with its brash advertising.” He paints in fluorescent colors borrowed from the streets and the television. In neon-bright hues.

And today? He is still doing the same thing, painting the same motifs with acid-bright colors that seem to fill the air with crackling electricity.

How does an artist like him make a living? Apparently he is not suffering particular hardship. He rents his studio from a textiles company. He sells his canvases through two of the most reputed galleries in Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghart and CAAW. On average, he sells a dozen or so works—his entire annual output—for about ten thousand dollars. Ninety-five percent of his works are sold abroad, only five percent remaining in China. These figures are similar for most Chinese artists—and even then, only recently have Chinese collectors been able to buy even five percent of the works.

Ding Yi says, “There are two types of art collectors in China, among the wealthiest sector of the population. The first is the people who buy with the intention of founding a museum “one day. They want to buy works by all the most important artists. and preferably several dating from different periods. The second group is bigger: it consists of people who buy art to go with the interior design of their office.” Since Ding Yi’s work is considered decorative, his future is assured from that point of view.

What about the museums? In China, they are just beginning to buy art and build up their collections. But since their budgets are tiny, they drive a hard bargain with the artists directly, without consulting the galleries. What does Ding Yi think about this? “I accept because I am not very prolific,” he says. “But it’s not the museums that are doing me a favor, but the opposite.” Ding Yi also has a further source of income: he teaches at the School of Fine Arts, where he studied.

Ding Yi, a fervent admirer of Mondrian, is one of just a handful of abstract painters in China. With an almost obsessive consistency, and just as constant—and highly subtle—variations, he has been painting crosses for over ten years. He gives each work the same title: Appearance of Crosses.

I have heard it said that his work is akin to calligraphy. It is not an obvious comparison. But when you have become fully imbued with the meditative and spiritual dimension of the undertaking, you begin to see where the comparison comes from. His alternation of crosses and Xs is, after all, reminiscent of computer languages. His work is calligraphy for the computer age, where words are transformed into binary code, then electronic or optical pulses, traveling ever faster.

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