Gianfranco Maraniello

Director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (Mart)

Writing about the work of Ding Yi necessarily places us amongst the generic ranks of observers evoked in a celebrated comment by Seurat, that is, amongst those who insist on investing paintings with something “other”: “They see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method and that is all”1.

The intransitivity of all analytic painting, the deliberate detachment from any semantic or iconographic reference and the search for elements that are the principles of a combinatory art that must then be verified in seriality or in variations on a theme delineate a specific attitude and a propensity for abstraction; however, these are not sufficient reasons for trusting the false modesty or false conscience of the artist in the guise of a faithful technical executor of his methodical discipline. With a coherence and a working practice of this kind, it is time that establishes the essential poetry and emerges as an inevitable value or issue for any attempt to identify the work with the underlying reasons for the operation.

It has been about twenty years now since Ding Yi first started using the cross sign as a matrix to mark and fill the surface of his canvases or of any other support chosen for the repetition of the module. What is involved is an iterated affirmation of an “existential diagram”, a constant crossing of lines that seems, whenever it appears, to reiterate the “here and now” of the artist’s pictorial practice. Whether the orientation of an abscissa or an ordinate is maintained, or whether there is a slipping of perspective in favour of an “x” instead of the sign “+”, one is in the presence of a trail marker in a path that coincides both with the time required for the generation of the individual painting and of the entire series of works. These always have the same title, Appearance of Crosses, followed by specification of the year of execution and the progressive reference number of each painting, or, if there is also the letter “B”, of each drawing.

The essential cataloguing mode according to which his works are named helps to avoid any involuntary symbolic or content-related references, pointing instead to the mere realization of the work itself and reflecting the methodical propensity for a painting practice that excludes everything that is not part of painting. Every surface used by the artist is totally invested by the alignment of signs deriving solely from the matrix of the cross. The equilibrium of the painting is achieved through a filling-in that is a suppressing of emptiness. Or rather, the painting is the absolute fullness of the surfaces, a totality that was perhaps already alluded to in Seurat’s “and that is all”. And one must ask oneself if the “c’est tout” of the great Pointillist painter is something other than an idiomatic, unreflective expression, than it really does say “all’; in other words, that it is not a common phrase the value of which runs the risk of not being adequately considered due to the tendency to use it to express an intention to “cut short”, to forestall further thought and discussion on the part of others and about that which is other. But if the method is all important, if it is everything, what then is the other that, according to Seurat, is not part of the painter’s practice? And why define as “poetry” that which others continue to see in it over and above the mode of painting?

Ding Yi’s use of the cross – a minimal marking and a minimalism aptly and paradoxically defined by the critic Hou Hanru as “excessive” 2- is also dictated by the adoption of an artistic strategy inspired by a desire to abandon the pictorial traditions of Chinese Symbolism and Expressionism, a departure from an academicism which, in terms of the meanings and semantic reference of figuration and representation, continues to render banal the possibility of exploring new paths in art. This is all the more so in a socio-political context in which every form of cultural expression is inevitably subject to censorship and hence, despite itself, made suitable for its ideological filter. Also playing on this presupposition is the ambiguous marketing of “new Chinese painting”, a phenomenon that is, moreover, an extraordinary vehicle of propaganda for a global economy that has to deal with the constant and urgent need for new markets. What is involved here are

“openings” that sometimes art is no longer called upon to interpret but rather to prefigure, offering a shared language made readily understandable through an obliging exoticism and the deliberate confirmation of its comprehensible and reassuring cliches, or by assimilating, combining and representing principles and iconic elements from other traditions which, especially in certain regions of Southeast Asia, end up delineating in a dialectical fashion a way of thinking of “the other” which – reversing the classic lesson of Edward Said – could be defined in terms of a fully-fledged “Westernism”. New Chinese painting must inevitably refer to such a specific and arbitrary context, to the sectorial system of art and its dynamics, to the specialization of a practice that must also deal with prejudices like everything that is “Made in China”, with the correlated terms of economic growth, new forms of consumption but also of low-cost “remakes”. Thinking about it though, Chinese art does not exist as such. Not only because it is a phenomenon that takes place in the constant presence of works and artists on the international art circuits, but also because the very notion of “China” evokes something so boundless that it cannot be contained either within the Great Wall erected by the legendary Emperor Shih Huang Ti or in a single, nominating word. For a European, China is above all else a place of the imagination. From the visions of Marco Polo to those of Leibniz, from Hegel’s observations on the writing system to the current focus on economic and demographic themes, everything that is “Chinese” is endowed with semantic features that are simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, precisely due to the sense of anxiety arising from the possibility of losing oneself in such boundless excess. The absence of individually manageable references is evident in the new Chinese megalopolises, of which Shanghai is the emblematic model. There are no end of books listing the statistics of an uncontrollable and euphoric building boom, about the failure of all attempts to conduct an up-to-date census of what the city constructs and consumes every day, about the dizzying speed of change to the urban fabric, where the amalgamation of chaos and planning has become a style. Ding Yi is a real Shanghai artist in this respect.

Apart from the biographic connection, it is his work that thematizes the relation of the individual with the city. In a society that is now experiencing the “anthropological” effects of the first generation of “single children” (and of the parents of single children) imposed by the law, the concentrated mass of expectations regarding the individual has brought about a complex mixture of egotism and a need to coexist. In the dynamism and the production delirium3 of Shanghai, Ding Yi appears to stand still, caught up in an almost reassuring work ethic dedicated to what might be a modern calligraphy in the world’s most modernist city. It would seem that he is focused upon himself, but his desire to experiment leads him not only to vary technique and materials, but also to pursue, with discreet circumspection, the changing scenario in which he lives. His paintings are characterized by a search for a correspondence with urban development, light pollution and the magmatic social fabric. Ding Yi interweaves his own coordinates with the “all’ of the surface of the paintings, developing the iteration of the cross with increasingly bright backgrounds and colors, as if to contain – in the contingency of marking his presence with the diagrammatic “+” module – the changing universe that the artist assumes and allows to happen in a Taoist fashion.

Lying somewhere between Roman Opalka and Daniel Buren, On Kawara and Piet Mondrian, he does not reject the possibility of being framed in a pre-existing pictorial tradition, but he is not directly indebted to what he could not even have known about in the socialist China in which he trained as an artist4. On the contrary, Ding Yi’s work finds confirmation in such precedents, as if to signal a kind of urgency, in other words as if the context and cultural climate of the city that is most emblematic of a new modernism favors the frequenting of the same cultural atmosphere that in the period between the 1940s and 1960s prompted Clement Greenberg to posit the theme of a rigorous “interior” history of painting formulated by means of an idiom which, in general, Ding Yi could still take on board in order to grasp the necessity of his “boogie-woogie paintings”.

Ding Yi’s interest in the relation of the individual with the city becomes even more explicit in the questionnaire he has prepared for visitors to the exhibition at MAMbo. It comprises a series of questions focusing on what should establish the criterion for political choices designed to achieve a happy life. Once the questionnaires have been filled in, they can be pushed through the slits of the special post boxes produced by the artist for the Shanghai Biennale in 2006. Post usually connects two places, a missive sent from one place to another. Ding Yi, however, gave visitors to the Biennale the chance to prepare letters not for another place but for another time, towards an indeterminate future. The visitors could even address the letters to themselves, an option also offered in the last question of the letter-questionnaire devised for the exhibition in Bologna: “If this was a letter for the future, what would your desire be?” The number of forms filled in by visitors in response to Ding Yi’s invitation so exceeded the capacity of the mailboxes that the overflow was attached to the wall, filling every available surface in the exhibition space in what is a kind of festive visual expression of everyone’s expectations about the destiny of their city, a paper patchwork that has become the image of what is now a collective form of wishing. Taking care of the environment in which one lives is combined with the expression of an undefined expectation, of an awareness to be acquired in a period of time ushered in by the filling in of the boxes of the multiple-response questionnaire, by the marking of the boxes with a cross. The temporal perspective adopted by Ding Yi in his work is evoked by the ephemeral sheet of paper given by each individual visitor. It is not a question of identifying an immediate practical goal, but of promoting the intrinsic value of paying attention, of taking care.

If, in his painting practice, Ding Yi renders the city’s dynamism intimate – expressing and transfiguring on his canvases the lights and the expansion of Shanghai – with the mailboxes the artist seems to attempt a kind of dispersion in the world, conceiving of a device that is waiting to be used. It is a kind of faith in design that also leads him to add his characteristic “+” sign to scarves or to objects with an apparent sculptural value. In actual fact, in both cases in which the artist treats himself to an apparent departure from the rigour of his painting, what is involved are applications on the faces of objects, on the skin of things, on the meetings of planes and surfaces that serve as pretexts for an exercise in two-dimensionality. Ding Yi goes to work on the weft of materials, marking them and clashing with pre-existing grids like those of Scottish fabrics, but he does not go so far as to produce volumes that cannot be related to the surface of the canvas and are not determined by his diagrammatic procedure. Indeed, it is the constant of the “+” sign that enables him to experience the world of life and to force the grid given by those fundamental Cartesian axes identified by the perpendicularity of the loom or the squaring of edges. In other words, he takes to the limit his analysis of the plane surface that constitutes the authentic and fundamental conventionality of the pictorial space. And it is in this dialectic between an insistence on the painting and an openness towards the object, between assumption of and encounter with the world, between coherence in the internal logic of the painting and interest in the existent, between sign and expectation, that a constant movement of contraction and expansion is articulated, constituting the vital rhythm of Ding Yi’s art and the metrics of his irreducible poetry.

1 The main theses of Filiberto Menna’s work could be considered as lines of perspective in which to observe, at a modulated distance, various strands of the present attempt to give an account of Ding Yi’s art.

2 See Hou Hanru, “An Excessive Minimalist”, in Ding Yi, curated by Jonathan Watkins, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2006.

3 The use of the word “delirium” is a conscious reference to Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978), the intention being to suggest a kind of continuity between the restless modernism of the Big Apple described by Koolhaas and the general hypertrophy of modern-day Shanghai.

4 Ding Yi himself declared his ignorance in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist published in Ding Yi cit., p. 32. Obviously, the author’s awareness of this is not an argument intended to forestall any critical observations regarding Ding Yi’s indebtedness to the history of modern art in theses which, however, should also be accompanied by a preliminary definition of the theme of originality of the art work. It is evident that themes of this kind, especially if they refer not only to artistic but also to the other production modes of modern-day Shanghai, cannot be adequately dealt with in this brief essay. The aim here is to consider the hypothesis that in some cultural contexts historic precedents may represent a comforting reference, a kind of corroborating principle of authority in support of exploratory art work.

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