The pictures are called Appearance of Crosses. But it would be a mistake to think at

Issue is mere appearance!

For Ding Yi, crosses have no symbolic character, they are simply placed lines, and signify liberation from his own cultural tradition. Although today he again avows just that cultural heritage.

When he arranged crosses for the first time in 1988, he was consciously marking a break in his work. “For me, however, the works consist solely of crosses arranged in a certain way without any meaning, and re thus made to a variation of painting; individual signs that serve to suppress she power of habit. With a rational and concentrated arrangement of the crosses, explore the depth and spatial relation-ships on the visual surface. The disperse application of colorful lines and shapes allows the limited spatial arrangement of the image surface to generate a more complex spontaneity. ”

The crosses in their respective linearity and color can be found in all the works on different backgrounds. They surface, mark the existence of the image as a combination of all its various energies. Ding Yi does not tire of using this subject. For these large format paintings, he uses fabrics, like the concept the root of the object trouvé, the found object. One possibility here would be a plaid material. It is primed so that its original color can only be recognized on the margins. The eye is disturbed by the variety of what sees. It appeals to all sensual qualities expect movement, optical scanning and experience of diversity and detail. Only in surveying the image, inspecting it from near and far, does the inner precision of the picture ‘structure come to light. The image here is divided into two proportionally equally parts darkness or, depending on their brightness their weight. Repetition like meditation, simplicity and complexity are balanced again one another. While here we might have suggestion of a city map, the image can allow like a reference to a large city full lights and advertising (a comparison, by the way, that Ding Yi does not shy away from all in gleaming luxurious color.

To set a counterpoint to the informal character of these works, they could be compared to the pattern paintings. But it would blatant to capture Ding Yi to such a “pat-tern”. Too often we feel reminded of minimal music, which with constant repetition communicates ever again a new listening experience. Here too he uses no stencil, each cross is noticeably drawn by hand. There is nothing blatant about the repetition here.

The order is defined by the support, existing for found lines, frames directions. They are

Independent compositions that very consciously set themselves against the perceived chaos. And again, as in the other artists, these too, in their excess, that often enough seems to explode the frame, the processual. That which inheres in the process of writing. There is a variety of information that lives the combination of the greatest concentration and order.

The drawings of Ding Yi have an autonomous feel within the oeuvre. It seems as if these works in particular succeed in elevating the image from the realm of the two dimensional, giving it a strong painterly quality. With charcoal, colored pencil, or chalk, the crosses are drawn into the foundation; they sometimes seem woven, of highly luminous material density, apparently palpable. Elsewhere, he works with garish color or ballpoint pens that he applies to graph paper. And a very different impression of lightness and liveliness is communicated. Variety is the subject here. Here, the drawn dominates, the linear moment reminiscent of architectural sketches, there ,a sensual, almost romantic luxuriating in color and materiality.

Ding Yi shows with his works that variety and detail, linearity, without exhausting himself in geometry, how silence and movement can be brought to harmonize with one another.

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