Q: Is there some important message that we can find in your work? If so. what is that message?

A: When you see a mountain, it already exists, when you see a painting, it already exists.

Ding Y constructs paintings with a unique method. He begins with a tartan check ground, then brushes colors over it repetitively in a regular overlapping pattern. Traditionally, in creation of a relationship between figure and ground is the chief principle of the creation or pictorial space. In this paradoxical approach. however, this relationship is prepared beforehand as an all-over grid on the canvas support, and the subsequent painting follows the same pattern. By abandoning all the rich possibilities of painting at the outset, Ding limits his task to repeating and confirming the pattern that is originally set as a given condition. This extreme self-restraint seems to be the only principle of this painting.

In this sense, Ding’s work might be seen as a continuation or the Kinds or systems or mechanical repetition found in minimal art. Also. from a certain point of view, it might be related to the postmodern method or using the images of mass-produced products without adding anything new. However. when confronted with the large surface of the actual works. the viewer is moved in a way that is incongruent with such an analytic view. These works express a profound sense of pictorial space as such.

In spite of their extreme regularity, these paintings are marvelous combinations of vibration and chaos. The intricate patterns are all painted freehand, sometimes In dozens of lavers, so mere are slight discrepancies from the original pattern everywhere. Ding Yi creates an elegant space with a method that represents an extreme in the systematic application of paint with a brush, but the labyrinth or tremulous, dancing color has a trance-like effect.

(t.a./s.a.)

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