Tenzin·Ngawang Gyaltsen

“’Temporal’ refers to change and flow; ‘spatial’ refers to location. You should know by now that north, east, south, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, above and below are space. Past, present, and future are periods of time. There are ten directions in space and three periods of time.”

Śūraṅgama Sūtra

Ding Yi has said he has no specific religious beliefs, that art is his religion. For an artist working with Tibet as a theme, maybe that’s a good thing.

From the perspective of travel, going to Everest at the end of November is not an option. Tour guides do not recommend it. Snow closes the roads, and as a result, other risks follow. The impermanence is something travelers deal with all the time. But for artists, the winter peaks are more essential. The touristy atmosphere of friendliness, healing, and travel is removed. By the time Ding Yi arrives, the sun is dying, and the night has begun to fall. It’s nearly twenty degrees below zero. According to the artist himself, at base camp there is a “sense of levitation.” This might be something like what phenomenologists call a “suspension”: stripping the senses of the concepts and interferences of modern civilization to honestly encounter Everest. What nature gives will enter the work.

Ding Yi’s creative work from Tibet can be viewed as lacking Buddhist imagery, but it does have Tibetan spirits. There is also a methodological encounter between the artist’s practice and classical Tibetan art. The sophisticated Thangka of Tibet not only require painters to undergo inner purification. There’s also a physical sacrifice that takes place. Painters often moisten the nib with saliva to blend mineral pigments, and over time, heavy metals may accumulate in the body. After years of breathless work with gold thread or with carving pictures of minute detail, many painters fall victim to eye disease or struggle to work for long hours.

Because of his previous use of fluorescent color, Ding Yi has already suffered some visual impairment. But in the context of Tibet, this is the “offering” of the body, what it takes to create something profound. Artists often work for more than ten hours, entering a state of ecstasy. This is similar to the mental state pursued by practitioners of meditation. In the rising and dying of thought, rather than saying Ding Yi created the work of his own impulse, one can imagine that Tibet has borrowed the artist’s symbol to reveal the secrets of nature.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but white, blue, yellow, red and green used in the work Dorje[2] are in line with the color system of the Five Buddhas. These five colors represent the five energies of Buddhism: desire, anger, ignorance, jealousy and pride. Buddhism does not regard the “five poisons” as purely negative. From the point of view of Tantric philosophy, they just represent mental energy. If used properly, the “five poisons” can be transformed into the “five wisdoms.”

Put simply, white corresponds to the Vairocana Buddha. “Ignorance” is a lack of distinction and artificiality, a pure and innocent state, the unaffected state of our existing mind. And when it turns into wisdom, it becomes the “embodied knowledge of the dharmadhatu” on which all dharmas are based, the essence of dharma.

Blue is “diamond-born”and corresponds to Akshobhya. Its corresponding affliction is “anger.” But anger actually allows one to discover problems. “Anger” is the anger at the self for discovering a problem, but there is no ability to resolve this emotion once it is generated. When we translate that ability into wisdom, like a blue sky, the world appears as “a great round mirror of wisdom.”

Yellow is “jewel-born” and corresponds to Ratnasambhava and growth. In everyday life, white tends to evolve into yellow as things accumulate on it. According to Buddhism, the source of growth is confidence, but can also correspond to the affliction of “pride.” If we can handle that energy properly, we can rid ourselves of egocentrism and gain the “wisdom of equality,” just as the earth tolerates all, remaining open to all things.

Red is “lotus-born” and corresponds to Amitabha, representing an appreciation for beauty. But this ability often becomes greed, becomes “possessive.” This energy can be transformed into compassion and love. It’s a passion. It is called “discriminating wisdom.” Red is like fire, warming but destructive.

Green is the Buddha of the north, Amoghasiddhi or“he whose accomplishment is not in vain.” It also carries the notion of “pushing.” Chinese Buddhism translates this energy as “doubt,” while the Tibetan translation is closer to “envy.” Both are common to an uneasy mood. In uneasiness there is a pushing feeling. In the five elements, wind is the energy of this push. If we can harness that energy, the five roots communicate with no obstacles. One gets what is called “wisdom in doing what you do,” letting your career become successful.

In the artist’s final mandala work, these colors are linked together. There are progressions and motions in the plane. It seems to symbolize the transformation of the “five aggregates.”

But despite these Buddhist names and signs, what is interesting is the connection between Ding Yi’s method of creative production and these Buddhist ideas – even if he is not Buddhist – the so-called “only knowledge without circumstance” of epistemology, that consciousness is more fundamental than objects. By this logic, the artist’s consciousness takes precedence over the “context” of their creation.

Ding Yi deduced the picture similar to the way of playing Go. In an interview he states:

“You can have a grasp of wholeness, control of something, but it’s still unknown. The search for the unknown does not end until the picture is presented. In that process you can feel it all the time, that failure is possible.”

For Ding Yi, the truth that art approaches is not a constant, not something static. As existentialists say, truth reveals itself in constant motion. For Ding Yi, it’s a lot of physical commitment, measureless carving, destroying the original image to reveal a new one. It’s a state of constant creation and destruction.

Layers of different pigments are first applied to the wood, then carve the covering layers again and again, until countless “appearance of crosses” are revealed. And in the process, the knife and wood cross thousands of times with contingencies beyond the artist’s control, and eventually a bigger picture emerges. In looking at the details of these works, one finds that the strokes and scores are infinitely connected, interacting in a kind of visual movement that presents a macroscopic scene. This creates the liveliness of the picture. It also constitutes the “microcosm” of the works: The microscopic links of each “appearance of the cross,” continuing in an endless succession, becoming visually causative like the theory of “endless origin” in the doctrine of “Consciousness-Only.”

There is also a presence around us, similar to the movement described above. That is time. “Time” continually denies the past and constantly embraces the future. When we realize this exact moment, it’s already gone. In Ding Yi’s works, each “appearance of cross” flashes into birth and death. It’s like a metaphor for “time,” the essence of existence. Einstein is said to have believed that time did not exist. Time, as we understand it, is just a slice of a four-dimensional existence. The works of Ding Yi are like these slices.

This will inspire people to think about Buddhist cosmology in a more subtle way. In theory, Ding Yi’s work could be displayed on an infinitive canvas or wood panel, going on endlessly. Each sign of the cross, each birth and death, is all one cause and effect. These causes and effects are not linear or mechanical. In these paintings, organized by the artist’s intuition, each sign of the cross interacts with the others in a mutual deduction. The birth of each symbol (color, size, intensity of carving) contains a relationship to the other symbols. These relationships are layered on top of each other, wrapping each other up – I am in you, and you are in me. For example, the strength of the connection between two symbols is not dictated by distance. The farthest two symbols probably possess the strongest visual relationship, creating the strongest visual tension in the picture, and thus forming a macro-sense of the universe in the work. In that sense, the elements of these images are integrated.

There’s a metaphor in the Avatamsaka Sutra that imagines our universe

like the beaded netting of an emperor’s palace (Indra’s Netting). The net is made up of countless gems, each with an infinite number of edges. When the light from Brahma’s crown falls on the edge of one of the stones, each gem reflects the others, shadow upon shadow, endlessly. The works of Ding Yi, including the “appearance of crosses,” form an infinite link like Indra’s Netting.

All that is essential, beyond binary thinking, contains the opposite of itself. Heidegger describes it as “sky-earth” or “earth-sky.” In Buddhist terms, it relates to “No Two” or the“Middle Way”: as mentioned above, the “five poisons” and “five wisdoms” can be converted. Ding Yi’s works contain this characteristic: his late-night creations remind people of “precept and wisdom,” as if they were a meditation session. But production of a specific image can be a battle: it comes from capturing an unknown truth, a knife and a target, body versus matter. The resulting impression of each notch is intense, even disturbing.

Artists bring combative tools. The destruction of ease and peace and progress towards truth form their own “brush strokes.” Arthur C. Danto regards “brushwork” as equally important as “flatness” (Clement Greenberg), positioning it as the essence of painting, and regarding it as an important feature of Modernist painting. In this sense, Ding Yi opens a new possibility for the “brushstroke” – let the destruction and creation take place at the same time to create microscopic turbulence, harmony across the whole.

This fits into our general understanding of the world: everywhere, through the ages, the ten-sided world operates in a general order, combined with physics, exhibiting an unparalleled precision. But from a microscopic point of view, at the cellular level, that of individual organisms and between nations, there is disharmony, even chaos. These antagonisms and unities form harmony in the process of movement, which is the way the world operates. It is also the visual dialectic of Ding Yi’s works.

What interests me is the phenomenology of Ding Yi’s creative practice. According to phenomenologists, it is hard for modern people to face the nature of the world. We have so many concepts, mediators, the fruits of civilization in our daily lives that it interferes with our understanding of the nature of the world. An astute comparison is found in Everest. There’s Everest from a postcard, the Everest in fairy tales, and the mountain itself. Which one is real?

In fact, what we interact with on a daily basis are intermediaries of Everest, as the saying goes “a mountain becomes a peak when viewed from the side.” And the meaning of things depends on how we relate to them, their appearance. Ding Yi’s encounter with Everest strips it of romance. The physical strain of lack of oxygen and low temperatures freeze the normal function of the logical, analytical brain in a state of suspension, stripping it of the mediators and concepts through which one normally thinks about problems and of the interference of modern civilization. In fact, it is closer to what Husserl called a transcendental reduction, letting consciousness unfold more clearly, and allowing for dialogue with sacred space and time.

For Ding Yi, the peak of Everest arrives just as the sun is setting. Countless people have painted and photographed Everest – the objective vision of Everest given by camera is another “real Everest,” but not its “existence.” This comprehended thing that exists is not a readymade but another “dasein” – human existence is closely related. In other words, the Everest presented by the artist must be related to the state of existence experienced by the artist. Only with the spirit that entered the artist at that particular moment when Everest opened could it appear.

Art – from early human rock paintings to ancient Greek sculptures, to Van Gogh or Anselm Kiefer – is a means by which humans relate to the truth through their own creation. Art is constantly changing,but the longing it represents is constant. Ding Yi respects this animistic Tibet: these works interweave reason and mystery, the artist’s will, the overall experience of Tibet, the secret between the earth and the sky.

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