DING YI (B. 1962)

Ding Yi is considered as one of the pioneering figures of abstract art in contemporary China. Ding's signature visual rhetoric, his grids, reminds us of what Rosalind Krauss described as “what art looks like when it turns its back on nature,” by announcing “among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Ding lets his marks simply be marks, just as John Cage used his music experimentation to “let sounds be themselves.”

Appearance of Crosses 94’-B41 (Lot 146) belongs to Ding’s Cross Series. Consisting of layered systematic intersection of crisscrossed, horizontal and “plus” signs methodologically and precisely laid down on paper. Even in this small work, Ding’s, in his practice, claims to challenge the definition of painting and image-making. The work is full of antithetical forces, at once nihilistic and celebratory, coded and poetic, empty and full, confined yet atmospheric. Ding renounces any display of technical virtuosity and he turns the creative process into an interiorization and meditation through mechanical application of paint and physical discipline. Ironically, nature of a work on paper brings us closer to Ding’s art-making as a disciplined, embodied practice.

Living and working in Shanghai, the cosmopolitan center of China and the world, Ding’s Cross Series also inevitably reflect his feeling of the urban landscape. The seeming monotonous yet variegated surface of Ding’s works records from a macro standpoint, “the boastfulness, the superficiality, the chaos, the disorder and the stimuli of city life.”

Krauss, “Grids,” October, summer 1979, vol. 9, pp. 50-64.
Ding Yi, “Deconstruction the Abstract,” Galerie Waldburger, 2008.