For the past three decades, Shanghai-based painter Ding Yi has remained faithful to the singular lexicon of two basic symbols: + and x. These two elements first appeared in Ding Yi’s abstract painting and drawings during the late 1980s and, in his 30-year career, remain the essential components of his ongoing series, the Appearance of Crosses.

His recent exhibition Interchange marks the artist’s first solo show with ShanghART in 12 years, following museum retrospectives at the Guangdong Museum of Art and the Xi’an Art Museum, and gallery shows in London and New York.

Occupying the spaciousground and the second flooigalleries, Intercbange featuredrecent paintings on canvasdrawings,andacrylics-onpaper, as well as paintings onbasswood panels completedafter 2015.
Hard-edgedabstraction and minimalism do notadequately describe the complexity of Ding Yi’s work: acombination of the two ismore apt or even a welcomecontradiction.
Guided by rationalityprecision, and the interplaybetween order and disorderone feels that we are observingaerial views of urban sprawl oiexpansive macrocosms.
Yi’s color in both hispaintings and works-on-paperhas always had an emotionatenor or carried moods whilethe all-over grid formationscomposed by the repetitive (xand (+) patterns, define specific spaces.
Innewerworksshapesdynamicemerge.ramping up the visual fieldand the rhythm or complexityof movement. A fine exampleof this is in the scroll-like, sixmeter folded Accordion Bookin color pencil and encased ina long vitrine.

In several new paintingson basswood-panels the act ofscoring or engraving the sur-faces
exposes areas of wood grain, a technique that DingYi began with monumental
paintings made for his 2015exhibition at Shanghai’s LongMuseum.

This show also featuresPainting Stand(2018), an outstandingsculpture.newPlaced in the middle of theground floor gallery space, at first glance the work appearsas a large rectangular storagerack in the form of an open-aluminum grid.

Inside are steel plates,allsimilar in depth, fabricated toresemble stretched canvases;all pristine, blank, and primedin high-gloss florescent colorswith a few black-and-whiteplates dispersed within.
Smaller plates or facsimile canvases’ lean againsttaller or wider ones withothers stacked neatly uprightside by side.One might con-clude the object embodies thefull range of colors used innearly all of the new paintingsin this exhibition.
Commenting in a recentinterview published in theGuangdong Museum cata-logue, Ding Yi wrote: “Theevolution of my work could bein terms of my materials, thepalette, and techniques. Whatdoesn’t change is the connec-tion between one piece andthe next, and the unansweredquestions from the previouspainting to the new one. Itreally is quite a deductive pro-cess and it’s been happeningfor three decades.”

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