2023.9.23-2024.3.24

Huamao Museum of Art Education, Ningbo

2023.10.21-2023.12.03

Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo

Curator: Cui Cancan

"Homeland and Journey" is the first solo exhibition of acclaimed artist Ding Yi in the city of Ningbo. The show is co-organized by Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education and curated by Cui Cancan. Beginning from Ding Yi's origin in Ningbo, the show comes full circle, showing his decades-long journey culminating in a return, which serves as both the reason and inspiration for the exhibition. This"journey" provides the content of the exhibition, describing a departure and return, illuminating the time and space of a story more than 50 years in the making. The exhibition at Ningbo Art Museum is divided into two sections: "Footprints of the City" and "Constellations and Recent Works." "Footprints of the City" presents the path of the artist through his exhibition history, connecting the long journey of the"Appearance of Crosses" around the world over more than 30 years, writing a small personal history alongside incredible evolutions of social change. Practical experiences of urbanity have nourished the eternal value of the "Appearance of Crosses.""Constellations and Recent Works" presents Ding Yi's new "Constellations" series, created especially for his hometown and focusing on the exploration of spirituality and cosmic stars from the "looking up" perspective adopted in his recent practice. The exhibition at Huamao Museum of Art Education is similarly divided into two sections: "The History of Works on Paper" and "Travel Sketch." The former focuses for the first time on Ding Yi's paper-based artistic experiments and practice, while the latter features his note-like image logs made during his travels. "The History of Works on Paper" is yet another thread to unravel the meaning of the "Appearance of Crosses." In Ding Yi's artistic system, paper works hold the same importance as works on canvas. They serve as means to experiment and refine subiects that later appear on canvas and yield unique understandings of the "Appearance of Crosses," providing a scale of measurement. As the end of the exhibition, "Travel Sketch" contains more vivid perspectives for viewers to understand Ding Yi's art and life in a more relaxed, subtle, and original way: "The Clock and Map" of the "Appearance of Crosses" painted by Ding Yi in different cities, as well as the changes in "Homeland, Short trip, and Letters," and the evolution of his studio over 40 years. In Ding Yi's more than 30 years of creation, the cross has developed from a symbol into a system of meaning. The "cross" has a different grammar. It is shaped by different forms, moods, ideas and realities. There is no good or bad between them. Each node of the evolution of the work is just a different branch of the cross system. Now, Ding Yi's exhibition has returned to his hometown, giving this journey a starting point, but the "Appearance of Crosses" remain far away, having not yet reached their end.

Foreword

Ningbo Museum of Art

Who is Ding Yi? This is a question that can’t be explained in one word, but his ancestral home is in Ningbo, an indisputable fact. This is not to insert a narrow theory of regional cultural influence, but a desire to bring the audience closer to this globally renowned contemporary artist. Both his parents are from Ningbo. His father went to Shanghai to learn business when he was a teenager. His mother passed away very early, so the young Ding Yi often traveled between Shanghai and Ningbo. As one of the first Chinese artists to participate in and continue to be active on the international contemporary art stage, Ding Yi often travels to international cities such as Berlin, Venice, New York, Bilbao, San Francisco, and Yokohama. Now, Ding Yi, who is in his sixties, has returned to his hometown to face his roots and use his avant-garde artistic practice to tell everyone the answer to this question. It has been 35 years since the first “Appearance of Crosses” was produced in 1988. According to Ding Yi's recollection, cross lines were just industrial jargon, symbols of the printing industry without any meaning or practicality. They brought painting back to the essence of form, which is spirit. They returned art to its origin and resonated with Chinese society at that time, which was “starting from zero” as the saying goes. The “Appearance of Crosses” is composed of lines, grids, and the characters “十” or “米”. If we summarize the evolution of his creative style over more than 30 years, each major transition lasts roughly 10 years. That is “steadying” to “overlooking” to “looking up”: from pure abstraction and formalism; to the contradictions and variations of the visual order reflected by the changes in urbanization; to thinking about the world from a cosmological perspective with new phenomena, ancient civilizations, and Nature overlapping to create a highly personalized visual illusion. Ding Yi believes that painting needs to wander, from simple to complex and back to simplicity, or the starting state, to help us see the essence of the problem. Ningbo Museum of Art was once a ship wharf, which served as the hub for Ding Yi and his fathers’ travels and also served as a link for the city’s outward exploration. Now it has transformed into a transfer station and source of urban ideological and cultural exchange. This process contains the dynamism of Nirvana and rebirth, the origin and inspiration captured in cycles of union and division, prosperity and decline. People, works, and space have been precisely integrated into one place like the “Appearance of Crosses”. Perhaps because of the memory of sailing to Shanghai and Ningbo in the past, the experience of traveling between hometown (generally speaking, not just Ningbo) and other places through art, or the constant return and exploration due to personal artistic pursuits... These connections between life and art have contributed to the planning of this exhibition which started last year. This solo exhibition “Homeland and Journey” is curated by Cui Cancan, who has been active in the domestic curatorial field for many years. The exhibition will be divided into four chapters. As the opening chapter of the exhibition, “Footprints of the City” uses the artist’s exhibition history to deeply describe his long journey around the world over the past 35 years. “Constellation and Recent Works” presents Ding Yi's practice since 2016, “looking up” and inward to the return of spiritual metaphor. It includes his latest “Constellation” series specially created for this exhibition and his hometown. These two parts will be displayed in the main space of Ningbo Museum of Art, while “History of Works on Paper” and “Travel Sketch” are presented jointly with Huamao Museum of Art Education, launching the first concentrated display of Ding Yi's artistic experiments using paper as a medium, as well as his “travel sketches” drawn like image diaries during trips, which form insightful connections with the opening chapter. The whole process is like returning to the most relaxed, intuitive and original state of a completed work. Horizontal and vertical are the basis and limits for marking a position on a plane; “0” and “1” in computer programming language can generate a parallel virtual world that is no less than reality; pictograms such as “十” and “×” are the basic elements that constitute Ding Yi’s works. The observation of the three is “radical”, reflects the essence of things and the “meta” concept. Just as W.J.T. Mitchell defined “meta-images”: “They are not just images of something, but also images that can reflect on the attributes of their own generation process.” When we see and think about Ding Yi's works, do they not? What about the collection of image representations that symbolize one’s own spirit and reflect the essence of things?! As art critic Feng Boyi said: “Ding Yi’s ‘Appearance of Crosses’ is a metaphysical restoration, returning to the beginning of artistic creation, re-approaching people and ideas, the language of painting, and a relationship of the origin of art and survival.” This exhibition is a continuation and new trend for Ningbo Museum of Art’s ongoing investigation “Research on Ningbo Artists”. Over the past 35 years, Ding Yi's art practice has provided a good example of visual samples for the modern transformation and innovation of Chinese contemporary art. Today, in such a special place and space, we expect that Ding Yi’s personal artistic context and regional context can create a new interaction, demonstrate an original spiritual thinking, and continue to extend the experience of life. This exhibition aims to reveal the aspects of Ding Yi’s artistic journey related to his hometown, past, and origins through the curatorial method explained to the audience by Cui Cancan. At the same time, as Director of the Ningbo Museum of Art Zhang Weiping hopes, Ding Yi will be a good example and starting point for teasing out new ways of recognizing regional culture in contemporary art and transcending the dichotomous logic of global and local. To a certain extent, Ding Yi’s self-reflection is like what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “autobiography”, that is, to trace the origin—hometown—the starting point of life, a kind of “source of the heart.”

Foreword

Huamao Museum of Art Education

A representative figure within Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi became famous for his abstract paintings of the classic visual symbol “十” and its variant “X”. His creative practice began in the 1980s and has spanned the development of Chinese contemporary art for more than 30 years. To this day he maintains a strong creative output and is active on the global contemporary art stage. “Homeland and Journey—Ding Yi” is the artist’s largest exhibition held in his hometown of Ningbo. The show presents a panoramic view of the artist's representative works throughout his career and aims to reveal the origin and meaning of abstract elements hidden deep in Ding Yi's artistic world. At the same time, as the first large-scale contemporary art exhibition held by the Huamao Museum of Art Education, this exhibition is also an important starting point for the museum's long-term developmental vision in field of contemporary art. In addition to the collection and research of ancient calligraphy, Western painting, Modern calligraphy, contemporary art, and woodcut prints, we seek to establish a multi-faceted museological scholarship system that is embedded in the context of and in dialogue with our current time. Ningbo, a city of history and modernity, has long played an important role in opening up and communicating within China and around the world, and thereby has achieved great creative integration. From the “Eastern Zhejiang School” that emphasized application of knowledge, to the “Zhejiang School” of calligraphy and painting that emphasized the study of things to seek knowledge, to the “Ningbo Merchants” that participated in the creation of China's early modern commercial landscape, to the eclectic and important modern “Shanghai School” of painting, Ningbo has displayed the multiple attributes of its culture across times. “Homeland and Journey—Ding Yi” starts from the image of “port/pier”, which coincides with Ningbo's urban attribute as a “port connecting the world” and is also consistent with the Huamao Museum of Art Education's plan to be based on the local while taking a global perspective. The museum attempts to start from “Ningbo” itself, especially with artists from Ningbo or living in Ningbo, and use contemporary art as an intermediary to develop the context of Ningbo's “local globalization”. The contemporary art exhibition series of Huamao Museum of Art Education is not only based on the large-scale and systematic collection of more than 30 years but is also closely related to the museum's long-term public art education practice with “public aesthetic education” as its core concept. The museum and its modern architectural complex (Dongqian Lake Aesthetic Education Center) have become an ideal place to carry out this vision. For example, in the exhibition hall designed by the famous architect Alvaro Siza, mysterious lines and ethereal space interweave with Ding Yi's “paper as a medium” symphony of time and space, forming an “art-architecture” energy field of mutual activation. In addition, the museum's series of contemporary art projects must collaborate with important institutions and groups for local cultural and artistic creation to promote Ningbo's local contemporary art ecology and form a community of creative practice in Ningbo. “Homeland and Journey” is divided into two chapters, the upper and lower chapters, and is exhibited with Ningbo Museum of Art. The Huamao Museum of Art Education holds the first part of this exhibition, with “History of Works on Paper” and “Travel Sketch” connecting Ding Yi's more than 30 years of artistic creation. The exhibition emphasizes the in-depth reproduction of the context of the times in which the artworks were produced, rather than being limited to the presentation of the final form of the works. It uses rich exhibition designs to re-present Ding Yi’s vast artistic domain, and ultimately forms an immersive experience of multiple abstract realms within the exhibition hall.

Exhibition Chapter 1: Footprints of the City

As the opening of the exhibition, "Footprints of the City" presents Ding Yi's artistic journey in a unique way. Different from previous exhibitions that follow chronology, this section parses through the artist’s exhibition history to present his footsteps, featuring over 35 years of the “Appearance of Crosses” around the world. A colorful work created in 1988 marks the beginning of the "Appearance of Crosses" series and is the starting point of this journey. Five years later, Ding Yi's works were exhibited at the 45^th Venice Biennale, the inaugural edition of Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and China Avantgarde, officially initiating the internationalization of Ding Yi and Chinese contemporary art more broadly. The following year, Ding Yi held his first large-scale solo exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum, titled Ding Yi Abstract Art Exhibition. Since then, the footprint of the "Appearance of Crosses" has spread all over the world. It has gone to the center of art and flashed in the far distance, appeared in noisy modern metropolises and the small ancient towns of Europe, created dialogue within the ports of Caribbean and vast Chinese interior, from Shanghai, Beijing, Tibet, New York, across oceans to Paris, Yokohama, and Queensland. These cities and civilizations visited by the "Appearance of Crosses" gave Ding Yi countless inspirations and once again activated their life and meaning. “City” has also been a theme of Ding Yi’s work. A four-panel painting was born from the later period of Shanghai's urbanization, which recorded the city lights, elevated buildings, and fluorescent colors twinkling everywhere in China's changing cities, becoming an elegy for Shanghai at the beginning of the twenty-first century. "City" also implies Ding Yi's view, pulling out the change of perspective that Ding Yi has experienced in more than 30 years, from “steadying,” to “overlooking,” to “looking up,” from form, concept, and then to reality, and finally returning to the spiritual journey. The origin of Ding Yi and Tibet also underwent several long changes, from the first step in 1989 to the return to the plateau 30 years later, the “Appearance of Crosses” carries the history it has experienced, showing the same density and texture as nature and faith. Returning home is returning to the past. In this modern art museum converted from a pier, the middle walkway seems to echo the beginning of Ding Yi's parents' journey, while the surrounding rooms and tortuous moving lines are like scattered islands, carrying the time and distance experienced by a section of “Appearance of Crosses.” “Crosses” and “City” tell the story of half Ding Yi's life and symbolize the long migration experienced by the wanderers scattered all over the country in this earliest city. "Footprints of the City" is not simply an individual history experienced by Ding Yi, but a macro history reflecting the evolutions of society and the art world.

Exhibition Chapter 2: Constellation and Recent Works

Following the direction of the journey, we come to the time and space of Ding Yi’s work today. Compared with the historicism of the previous section, "Constellation and Recent Works" present Ding Yi's practice since 2016, as well as his latest “Constellation” series created for this exhibition and his hometown. The huge scale and sequential combinations form the main vision of this section, which completely and comprehensively show us the latest progress of the “Appearance of Crosses” after more than 30 years of accumulation. This chapter is titled “Constellation and Recent Works,” which comes from a certain image related to the journey. The previews chapter is about scattered cities, Ding Yi's footsteps, while this one is about the deep and endless starry sky. No matter how the footprints of the cities change or what changes the history of the “Appearance of Crosses” undergoes, the vastness of the starry sky is eternal. The starry sky shrouds the city, guiding his work along the road. It is immortal, infinite time, yet it hangs by a thread, like the human heart or fate. "Sea" forms another series of recent works. In these dark blue images, the ripples of the “Appearance of Crosses” are as thick and wide as the sea. It heralds Ding Yi's new journey into the spiritual world, sailing from one sea to another in search of the infinite variables of the “Appearance of Crosses.” A black and white work created in 2020 shows that Ding Yi's exploration of form has never stopped. The scarcity of colors in the picture makes the sense of perspective and dynamics more obvious, and the internal contradictions of the picture are once again intensified. Gathering and disconnecting, solemn and eternal, dim, and meditative, form returns to the metaphor of spirit. In one group is the “Constellation” comprising twelve smaller paintings, which complements the huge work created in 2016. Together they become the “inner view” of the entire section. The difference between the works marks the different grammar set by Ding Yi for the "Appearance of Crosses" in recent years and becomes the key to their interpretation throughout his career: Ding Yi's “Appearance of Crosses” is always based on the tension between “what can be told” and “what is impassable.” On the basis of this dialectic, there is the infinite variety of spirit and emotion expressed by the “Appearance of the Cross,” alongside the square inch of the line, the form of the character “米” (rice) that his work evokes, the grid it adheres to, the limits and order that give rise to the “Appearance of Crosses.”

Exhibition Chapter 3: The History of Works on Paper

“The History of Works on Paper” focuses for the first time on Ding Yi's paper-based artistic practice.

Unlike most artists, paper works play a vital role for Ding Yi. They not only serve as the origin and inspiration of Ding Yi's “Appearance of Crosses” series but have also determined the trajectory of Ding Yi's concepts from the late 1980s to the present.

After leaving a job at a toy factory in 1987, Ding Yi started to develop the first versions of his “cross” on paper. He used a ruler and tape to draw calm, rigorous works that left no trace of being made by hand, lending precision to abstraction. It was also at that time that Ding Yi cemented two principles that would continue in his work. The first is that the “cross” is the basic element of the picture and its only content. The second is that all the works are named “Appearance of Crosses” plus the year number—in contrast to an artistic interpretative system.

This section starts with that original group of works, and then, under “Sketch and City,” we review the relationship between several paper works and his exhibition history in response to “Footprints of the City” exhibited at Ningbo Art Museum. In the next section, “The Initial Conception in 1990,” we display several notes and works by Ding Yi in the 1990s, tracing how the “Appearance of Crosses” formed a stable and decisive conceptual system. Like the Qing Dynasty Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden or a periodic table of elements for Ding Yi’s crosses, “The Album and Scroll Paintings” leads our eyes to Ding Yi's experiments with form, media and material on paper: how to restore the cross to its "root" state through long scrolls of several meters length, looking for the rich relationship between circle and square, black and white, geometry and structure.

"The History and Times of Works on Paper" is the climax of this unit. We chose a paper work from each year to conduct a comparative analysis showing what the artist gave up during this long process, as well as what he kept. The grand and subtle perspectives, like the hour and second hands of the clock of history, review the changes and developments of Ding Yi's paper creations over 36 years. “Large-scale Paper Works” closes the chapter, leading one’s eyes from changes over time to extensions in space, revealing the rich and overlapping relationships in the works. These huge paintings encapsulate Ding Yi's practice and thinking over many years, accumulating the practical experience of the artist and his mixed grammar of creation while maintaining a consistent concept.

“The History of Works on Paper” presents another thread to Ding Yi’s 35 years of practice. In his artistic system, paper works hold the same importance as works on canvas. They serve as means to experiment and refine subjects that later appear on canvas and yield unique understandings of the “Appearance of Crosses,” providing a scale of measurement.

Exhibition Chapter 4: Travel Sketch

"In recent years, I have traveled to many third world countries and regions and felt they are the birthplaces of ancient human civilizations, like Egypt, Greece, India, Arabia, Africa. Each has experienced brilliant and powerful periods and are part of the whole world. Thus, I have come to incorporate these trips into my creative thinking."

—Ding Yi

As the exhibition concludes, “Travel Sketch” offers a vivid perspective on Ding Yi's art and life in a lighter, more nuanced, and original way, both as a loosening of serious themes and as a forgotten corner of the narrative of art history.

The unit begins with a map showing the cities that Ding Yi has visited. The routes and distances between cities have long exceeded the distance between Earth and the moon. Scattered places, like stones of different sizes, are waiting to be connected by “crosses,” to become the dotted lines of constellations, to transform into fixed stars and fate, the images of a repeating calendar.

“Travel Sketch” consists of five sections: “The Clock and Map”, “Travel Sketches of Three Regions”, “Homeland, Short Trip and Letters”, “Travel Sketch documentary”, and “Migration within Shanghai.” In the first section, we brought together sketches Ding Yi made during his travels to different cities and listed them by place. These works vary in form and time and record various experiences of travel. Some radiate sunlight; others appear dark. Lined up, the works are more like a “God's view” of the sky. It would be a stretch to say that these works are sketches from life, but you can always find some impression related to the city or a peek into the author's mind during days of travel. In the next section, we narrow the perspective again, looking for fuller, richer slices from three longer trips, “Together at Basel,” “Monsoon Season in Southeast Asia,” and “Return to Tibet.” We don't know whether the artist was on vacation or working. But the large number of sketches mean that the journeys were productive, especially in Tibet which is known for its nature and spiritualism. Ding Yi's paintings are particularly neat and devoted, and his journeys become like pilgrimages into mystery. Like Rauschenberg’s footsteps, we follow from New York to Beijing, and then from Tibet to South America, observing Ding Yi's three trips to Tibet in 1989, 2018, and 2021.

Where there are long treks, there are also short glimpses. This section comprises several trips of one- or two-days length. “Impressions” and “memory” become particularly important over short distances. The two Ningbo cross sketches appear to have a different meaning. Perhaps they carry the deep emotions of a son towards his hometown. The pictures appear to add the “heaviness” of a fatalistic constellation. Two letters, one from 1985 to Beijing, then the center of art. Another was sent to Shanghai from as far away as Italy, greeting the start of a new year in 1993. These letters document how relations with the outside world were maintained in an age when travel was difficult. A documentary about travel brings together these past events with today. The mixed cut material gives a sense of the sunshine and textures of different times. Continuing until the end of the section, Kodak print photos capture the changes to Ding Yi’s Shanghai studio. In addition to the works in the picture, the objects and time in the studio have long disappeared. Outside the window, the seen and unseen sights of the city reflect the great changes of Shanghai.

In 1999, the year when Ding Yi moved his studio to West Suzhou River Road and Shanghai's fastest growing year, he recorded the city's high-rises and flickering street scenes in fluorescent color. In 1983, Ding Yi had a small studio on Zhengsu Road. That year he was deeply influenced by Utrillo, painting the melancholy, cold and beautiful houses in the alleys of Shanghai. From the opening of the exhibition with “Footprints of the City,” to “Travel Sketches,” witness Ding Yi's 40-year journey of art and life. Now, Ding Yi's exhibition has returned to his hometown, giving this journey a starting point, but the “cross” remains far away, having not yet reached their end.

Curator: Cui Cancan

Appearance of Crosses 2023-6

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