More than 20 years ago, Ding Yi began his project of ‘crossing out’ representational art in China. He tells Sam Gaskin how his abstracts have become expressions of his home city, Shanghai.

if you look for metaphors in DingYi’s paintings there’s a lot you can see.His paintings and drawings, which vary greatly although they’ reall pains takingly composed of small crosses, suggest woven fabric, circuit boards, flags, military camouflage, cultures brawling in a Petri dish and much more.
Although Ding first adopted the cross as a way to a void representational painting, he doesn’t recoil at the mention of these connotations.In 1988 when he began his Appearance of Crosses series,I wanted to make art not look like art.So when others thoughtI was a cotton-print painter, I felt happy because I was no longer a traditional painter.I had a new language and new technique, so I feel it’s acceptable to me if people think my works look like carpets or wallpaper.
Unlike most carpets and wallpaper. though,Ding’s works are not only vibrant but full of movement-up and down, in and out, slowing at intersections, and slowly dilating like creeping urban sprawls.The larger canvases, over two me tres

by two me tres, also choreograph the movements of their viewers.changing completely as we walk towards them, their intimidating mathematical complexity, like maps of DNA or Google Earth cityscapes at night, becoming much more human as individual brush strokes appear.

With almost no Chinese abstract painters before him, Ding has become one of Shanghais most revered artists. He is praised by Zhou Tie hai. another of Shanghais big name contemporary

painters and the executive director of the Min sh eng Art Museum, for the persistence and patience evident in his solo show, which features 6l works spanning 25 years.
When he was starting out, Ding experimented with various methods including performance art, but saysT had to choose my own artisticroad At that time, the whole of Chinese

contemporary art was expressive and discoverable.I wanted to make my works rational but without too much concrete explanation or connection with reality.’ Taking the road less traveled, as advertised, made all the difference.

Ding chose crosses as the atoms of his oeuvre after noticing their use checking the alignment and colour in publishers’ proofs. The publisher’s cross is a formal construction, functional but meaning less, which is exactly how Ding sees his own crosses.

Five years after finding a cross to bear, in 1993 Ding represented China at the Venice Biennale, his first trip abroad. While the other participating Chinese artists works were all representational(with the exception of XuBing’s),Ding was exposed to other art that helped him sharpen his vision.In particular, he was

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撰文/ Sam Gaskin

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