In August 2025, the Visionaire team visited Ding Yi’s studio. For the inaugural edition of Visionaire’s new Studio Visit column, Yu Guangxi sat down with Ding Yi for an engaging conversation, while Swedish photographer Robert Nilsson captured the studio’s evocative details on film.

Ding Yi: In the Process of Creation

On Fuxing Island, the only inland island on the Huangpu River, Ding Yi has established his studio in a former shipyard. After the New Year, he had just opened up the three-story-high space and turned on the lights when he immediately “went into full gear,” developing new works for his solo exhibition in Kunming, Yunnan.

Those familiar with Ding Yi know that he has maintained the habit of beginning work in the evening and painting continuously into the early hours of the morning for many years. He never sits down to smoke a cigar; instead, he works with “one hand holding it, the other working.” For large-scale paintings, he uses a lifting platform, and only when he reaches the lowest edge of the canvas does he sit down and rest for a while. “The work itself is also physical labor.”

“This is where I spend the longest part of my day. I spend at least 12 hours here out of every 24—more time than I spend at home,” he says. His new studio had to have natural light and sufficient height. He turned down a proposal for a basement garage in a more central location because there was “absolutely no daylight.” “The moment I walked into this factory building, I knew it was the one. I made the decision immediately and booked the place without hesitation.”

Looking back at Ding Yi’s practice—an abstract grid system built from the cross as its basic signifier, with symbols scattered across the picture plane like constellations, at once resembling patterns and retaining a rigorous rational structure—the Appearance of Crosses series and system will soon enter its 40th year. What new breakthroughs might emerge in terms of materials, space, and narrative? For Ding Yi, moving into the new studio on Fuxing Island may also mark a new beginning and a new turn in his practice.

The Migrating Studio, the Map of an Artistic Practice

The migration of Ding Yi’s studios mirrors the changing rhythm of Shanghai as a city.

Leaving the city center, one crosses Dinghai Road Bridge to reach the island. The drive feels like passing through a fissure in time: on one side is the present-day Yangpu waterfront, on the other a landscape still carrying the industrial warmth of the last century. Yet it is precisely this distance to Fuxing Island that gives Ding Yi a sense of clarity from within the margins of the city.

In his twenties, Ding Yi rented a small room on Zhengsu Road near Fudan University, where he worked in seclusion while preparing for his studies; he subsequently moved back and forth between the university and the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute. In the mid-to-late 1990s, as urbanization accelerated and the Chinese art world became increasingly commercialized, he established his studio in the outskirts of Daduhe Road, finding relative stability in an industrial factory that had yet to be demolished. Around 2000, he returned to the city center, to the western stretch of Suzhou Creek, where he witnessed the transformation of the river and the growing concentration of artists in the area. He then spent more than a decade at M50, witnessing the art district’s transition from the urban periphery toward the center. In 2015, he moved to the West Bund Art District, remaining there until another round of redevelopment prompted his relocation to Fuxing Island.

Each move has tied his gaze to the pace of urban transformation: from factories to creative parks, from Suzhou Creek to the Huangpu River, from the urban center to “island time.” This trajectory echoes the structure through which he has divided his artistic development into three modes of looking: “looking straight ahead,” “looking downward,” and “looking upward”—from constructing a visual language on the picture plane, to responding to urbanization through fluorescent colors and a sense of speed, and eventually raising his gaze toward broader coordinates of civilization and the spirit.

“Shanghai is a city that has truly experienced the baptism of modernism,” he often says. Its open cultural character has naturally led him to look toward the wider world, while his own physical presence remains rooted in the constantly changing reality of the city. For Ding Yi, the rhythm of Shanghai is both an engine driving the external world and a force that continually pushes him to renew his personal visual language. It provides a channel for dialogue with the global art world while constantly stimulating him, through new settings, materials, and techniques, to adjust the frequency and intensity of his work.

This “Shanghai character” can also be precisely projected onto Ding Yi’s artistic world: restrained, refined, and highly adaptable. It is neither marked by the earthy roughness or emotional outpouring associated with certain forms of regional art, nor by the elegance or poetic quality of traditional literati painting. Instead, it captures the city’s sense of order and efficiency, as well as its response to the conditions of globalization.

Seen from this perspective, Appearance of Crosses is much like the architectural grids, subway lines, and even the precise calculations of the financial systems that structure the city—numbered, orderly, and procedural. Each cross seeks possibility within a strict system of self-imposed limitations, pushing a simple pictorial element toward a more distilled and universal visual language.

Repetitive, Rational, Ever-New

Around 1987, Ding Yi established the “cross” as the basic unit of his visual system, formally naming it Appearance of Crosses in 1988. “At that time, there was not yet much rationality in Chinese art. There was more emphasis on expression, or what was called abstract beauty. I felt that I had to take a rational path, establishing repetition, pattern, rationality, and so on as artistic positions.”

He therefore reduced his titles to a system of numbers—“Appearance of Crosses + year + serial number”—using rulers and ruling pens, masking and filling in areas of color, and attempting to strip away “stories” and “interpretation” as much as possible in order to avoid any external associations.

This abstract, rational, and chronologically structured practice soon became increasingly complex through the process of making. On the one hand, he entered into genuine dialogue with a broader artistic system, and modernism was no longer something he could only imagine through reproductions; on the other, the rapid changes in Chinese society demanded that his visual language continually adjust its frequency. “I certainly won’t become a fundamentalist rational abstractionist, repeating the slogans and declarations of 100 years ago… Bringing many things that are happening in this era into the work is, at the very least, meaningful.”

Entering the 2000s, the grid of Appearance of Crosses began to break apart. Fluorescent colors, metallic tones, charcoal, and chalk appeared in succession, while the speed of reality, the shifting light of consumption, and the noise of the city were absorbed almost synesthetically. Unlike the paths taken by many artists who “burned out through acceleration,” Ding Yi describes his own as a “long road.” “To truly become an artist, 60 is only the beginning… The decisive battle comes after 70.” He has withdrawn time from teaching, judging, and social engagements and returned it to artistic creation, willing to devote “all the time that comes afterward to searching for and resolving [questions of spirituality].”

Around 2020, Ding Yi began experimenting with a wide range of materials—including Dongba paper, Tibetan paper, sketchbooks, album leaves, and handscrolls—bringing field notes, landscapes, and traditional systems of signs into his abstract vocabulary. Visual elements such as the night sky, constellations, and folk colors were transformed into overlapping crosses, bands of color, and zigzag structures, turning Appearance of Crosses into a highly open-ended language. The night sky beneath Mount Everest, the waters and starlight of port cities, and the wind corridors and vertical vegetation zones of the Hengduan Mountains became coordinates for his “looking upward.” His visual language thus moved from a singular formal logic toward a spiritual order in which nature, folklore, and mythology could enter into dialogue with one another.

Ding Yi broadly divides his practice into three stages: “the modernist period; the period concerned with the process of urbanization in Shanghai; and the period concerned with civilizations around the world.” He is not concerned about being accused of “returning to imagery.” What he said when he was young does not have to be followed in a fundamentalist manner. What matters is entering unfamiliar territory while maintaining passion and anticipation. “You don’t get bored. You always feel that the next painting might be better, so you work very hard to find those things.”

The walls of his studio are covered with artworks he has collected over the years. They have served, almost silently, as mentors in the formation of his artistic language—from works acquired at European auctions by artists including Salvador Dalí, Keith Haring, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Richter, and even Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Lenin. He mentions that his most expensive acquisition is a work by Sean Scully. Although it was costly, he says, “I didn’t lose out,” as Sean Scully later collected one of his works as well. He also recalls being influenced by Maurice Utrillo as a student. Ding Yi studied Utrillo’s techniques of “line and slight distortion” and painted many landscapes such as Hongkou Park.

Under the gaze of these masters and predecessors, his Appearance of Crosses has continually been recalibrated and expanded between tradition and the contemporary.

Endless Fields, Endless Appearance of Crosses

At this very moment, in Kunming, the Kunming Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of Anthropology at Yunnan University are jointly presenting the solo exhibition Ding Yi: The Road Around the Mountain. One institution points toward the contemporary, the other toward history and anthropology. At the heart of the exhibition is Ding Yi’s reweaving of the Naxi Road to Heaven through the language of abstraction. The original is a spiritual map of the ascent and reincarnation of the dead, guiding souls across nine black mountains, through the realms of the dead and the living, and finally to the realm of the gods.

Initially, Ding Yi experimented with a horizontal scroll, but after consulting scholars, he shifted to a vertical format—“because essentially, it is a passage for the soul to ascend.” For the project, he visited scholars Bao Jiang and He Hong, as well as Dorje, director of the Lugu Lake Mosuo Museum. He also invited Tibetan filmmaker Wanma Zaxi to make a documentary, in an effort to avoid distorting the narrative logic through his own interpretation.

For Ding Yi, “being local” is a fieldwork method. For the Yunnan series, he travelled to Yunnan three times between June and November 2024. Following the winding mountain roads from Lijiang to Shangri-La and Deqin, he drove in and out of Naxi villages rarely visited by tourists, stayed in Dongba households, spoke at length with ritual specialists, and observed how pictographic writing and ritual practices connect the order of the “cosmos–gods–human beings” into an integrated whole. “That continuous zigzagging line comes from their difficult mountain paths, winding waterways, diverse landscapes, and the colours favoured in local folk culture.”

In The Road to Heaven 2024-B19, he follows the progression of “the dead–the living–the gods,” replacing figurative imagery with Appearance of Crosses symbols. At the end of the composition, detailed annotations identify the abstract symbols corresponding to numbers such as “thirteen temples” and “seven golden mountains.” He describes the work as both a sincere act of “transcription” and an expansion of language: reconnecting the “cross” with the world of life—with human history, origins, and loss, and with the possibility of reconciliation between ancient lands, traditions, and nature.

“I made my first work in the Appearance of Crosses style in 1988, and I went to Tibet in 1989… I was deeply moved at the time, but I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t want to turn it into an existing visual representation of Tibet, so I didn’t make a single painting.” Decades later, he returned to Tibet in 2021–2022, arriving at Everest Base Camp at night: “It was black sky and black earth, with only the stars above.” From then on, “galaxies” entered the world of Appearance of Crosses. In Lhasa, he exhibited a group of works inspired by the night sky; in exhibitions at Qingdao West Coast Art Museum and in Ningbo, the correspondence between the sea and the stars became a new visual structure.

For the Yunnan project, he set himself a clear “direction”: to focus on Naxi Dongba culture rather than attempting a panoramic representation of all 25 ethnic groups. “It originates from the Bon tradition of Tibet, so it connects with the threads of my work on Tibet. It also has a 1,400-year history of pictographic writing, and it can still be read and written today.” He began with something “locally produced”—Dongba paper. Made by pounding tree bark into pulp and mixing it with materials such as wolf’s-bane, the paper is resistant to insects, slightly absorbent, and produces a subtle bleeding effect. “These works on paper are not sketches; they are complete works. I can finish one in four or five hours in an evening, and they help me enter a steady state of creation.”

This method also extends to the construction of the exhibition space. In one gallery at the Kunming Contemporary Art Museum, he covered the floor with Himalayan salt bricks, subtly evoking the Tea Horse Road and the ancient salt routes. A zigzag structure brings together the vertical changes of mountains, waterways, roads, and vegetation within a single image. In the “Twenty-Eight Mansions” section, he extracted star-map motifs drawn by Naxi scholars and allowed them to “return to the sky,” floating above a flowing night sky woven from Appearance of Crosses.

Ding Yi emphasizes that the works on paper presented in the Kunming exhibition are not sketches; the texture, subtle bleeding, and absorbency of the paper itself have become part of his vocabulary. Returning to the physical process of working on large-scale paintings, he uses rulers and masking tape to establish proportions, applies several layers of colour according to a predetermined scheme, and then uses carving or scraping tools to create texture. These steps function like an internal grammatical check: which lines and symbols can pass through and enter the grid of Appearance of Crosses, and which blocks of colour need to be reduced to pure rhythm.

He sees this process of translation as a form of “compliant” creation. For precisely this reason, he is willing to bring more media into the practice. A planned sculpture studio may allow the visual units developed on paper and walls to be directly translated into volume and texture. The points of light visible at night, the salt-brick floor, and Dongba pictographs may likewise become components of the work. He chooses to reconnect Appearance of Crosses with the faint light of ancient civilizations, using a methodology of fieldwork, dialogue, and continual revision to bring abstraction face to face with the present and generate a new grammar here and now.

Several migrations and decades of practice, together with stacks of handmade paper and travel notebooks brought back from the mountains and countryside, have refined Appearance of Crosses into a language that is both restrained and malleable. Ding Yi acknowledges the pressure that comes with age, but says that it has also brought him greater freedom in his practice. “To truly become an artist, 60 is only the beginning.” Unlike artists who achieve recognition early and burn brightly for a short time, he has chosen “the long road.” After 60, teaching, judging, family responsibilities, and social obligations can gradually be set aside. With time returning to his own hands, he has instead found greater creative drive and patience.

From the height of factory buildings to the vertical strata of mountains and rivers; from numbered grids to the orbits of constellations; from the fluorescent glow of the city to the order of mythology… anything can become Appearance of Crosses. And Appearance of Crosses will continue to reveal new forms over time. “For example, with this painting, I still don’t know what it will ultimately look like.” He says this with a smile.

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