Born, raised, and educated in Shanghai, Ding Yi developed a highly personal style that not only accumulated notable fame and desire for him within the Shanghai community but also pushed his works onto the international stage in the 90s. By as early as 1993, he participated in several momentous exhibitions on contemporary Chinese art, including the 45th Venice Biennale and the China Avant-Garde exhibition that toured Europe. As an attempt to distance himself both from the burden of the traditional Chinese culture and from the influence of early Western modernism, Ding Yi decided to utilize a laboring repetition of “x’s” to express his desire to return to the very foundation of art and to forge a purely artistic language.

Appearance of Crosses 95-B65 fuses Ding Yi’s signature repetitive use of “x’s” with a characteristically spirited choice of highly saturated and varied colors, showcasing simultaneously a systematic, impersonal adherence to structure as well as a lively appearance of chaos. This flat, patterned and seemingly endless repetition breaks away from the Cynical Realism and Political Pop that was prevalent in China’s Post-’89 Art. Instead, the work attempts to create an artistic utopia that continues the rationality evident in all of Ding’s work.