On Sunday, November 19th, 2017, it rained non-stop in Shanghai. I had just unpacked when my Shanghai Biennale colleagues took me out on a tour of local galleries and museums they had prepared, intended to guide me about the extension of the artistic geography of the city. After lunch, my guides took me to the West Bund, the imposing compound of industrial buildings and hangars that, since 2015, harbors some of the most important art galleries and organizations in China. Much to my surprise, there, amidst this compound, was Ding Yi’s studio. He had taken the initiative to invite me, even if he could not be a candidate for my Project, having already participated in the biennale as part of the jury that had appointed me. I went to the meeting intrigued but also a bit distrustful since “courtesy visits” are not always comfortable situations.

Huge was my surprise. Ding Yi’s studio was an enormous industrial building, around thirty or forty meters deep, that had several very white, splendidly illuminated walls, perfect to exhibit a monumental painting. I have had the chance to see some of the largest studios, but few with similar museographic neatness. On those walls, the artist had a number of large-format works, almost four meters high, as a rule: cross constellations in various agglomeration or dispersion degrees, which vertically and diagonally traversed the panels’ surface, conjuring up energetic and luminous fields. A succession of objects of intense visual activity, not precisely because they had visual illusions similar to the Op Art (an orientation that Ding Yi has rejected explicitly and practically) ^[1] but because of the intensity the works produced on the mind of the observer. Moreover, it was evident that these paintings had been done in this area, with the aid of an articulated mechanical platform; that well they adapted to the place and light! Beyond exchanging some words with Yi (which were not entirely substantial, such as the indication that the works in the studio had formed part of a recent exhibition and were intended for another show in the making), my feeling was dominated by the energy of the paintings and the ambition that both the works and the studio exuded.

It was hard to repress the feeling that the safety of that work was related to the social moment in a country such as China that, in recent decades, has spearheaded, for better or worse, the dynamism of the 21st-century. That epochal effect was, of course, deliberate: Ding Yi has said that his task is to create imagery that “preserves a certain cultural ambition for the future.” ^[2] Nevertheless, such temporality condition soon took a backseat before the way paintings themselves imposed their own reception terms. No formalities whatsoever, they revealed themselves as the product of long elaboration, not so much of the particular works, but the practice that had generated them. Under the relatively anodyne title that Ding Yi chose to sign the work he has been doing since 1988, Appearance of Crosses, the paintings resulted from a thirty-year ripening. Their energy consists of sustaining, after three decades, the immediacy and clarity effect, which, in the appreciation of the so-called abstract painting, we usually understand as the appearance or forcefulness of novelty. In other words, one of the main effects that the refinement of these paintings had, was claiming an immediacy state that rejected, in the first instance, any suggestion of history or culture. As a matter of fact, and as Ding Yi has eloquently expressed, one of the tasks of his painting with crosses consists of annulling every solid semantic or referential association. In the painter’s words, his “symbols are used to inhibit the inert meanings of experience.”^[3]

That immediacy, where the work aspires to an iconic purity due to the eviction of all mimicry or iconography, has some conditioning elements. On the one hand, it was evident that Yi did not struggle at all with the, by the way, too frequent problem, that the conditions under which the works had been generated in the studio might be distorted by their moving to the sterile fish tank of the white cube. These were planks born in the whiteness of the artificiality that we have assumed as a standard at the Museum, so that, when going out to public domain, they found their territory instead of adapting by refusing their context. As he himself has observed, the reason why artists tend to use former factories and warehouses as their studios has to do both with the feeling of “going to work”, instead of staying at home, and having an authentic experience of the form that an exhibition will have when it occurs. ^[4] These were paintings of public domain, turned over an exterior that, at no time, suggested the studio as a space of intimacy or domesticity, which renounced the simulation of a secret, expressed as a sign system. The wall of Ding Yi’s studio makes it possible to rehearse, at the time of production, the installation conditions of his works at the institutions of their temporary or permanent residence. That naturality with which Ding Yi’s paintings assumed their public exhibit destiny, even in their inception space, is not banal. Besides turning their dimension into one of their meanings, it immediately states the notion that these works are in a long series where one same gesture – the small crosses and asterisks of his work- produces surface variations and patterns that aspire to be considered in their uniqueness, as well as in the memory of a whole journey throughout other alternatives of the series. Each work is in its turn an individual painting, and one more among the many different variations, fugues, and cantatas of a potentially infinite composition. The feeling that each work is a body of forms on the surface, exploring a possible variant in one methodology, was completed or offset by the seduction of details. Also by the individuality of the marks that Ding Yi has used to create his language, such as crosses, plus signs, and asterisks, painted with perfect command of the paintbrush but, even so, evidently traced by the unique signature of a wave of the hand. Occasionally, Ding Yi engraves those registrations through discrete furrows on the board surface by way of scratches, intaglios, and scars. At a short distance, under a myopic gaze, the works are offered as an experience of insisting and repetitive pictorial texture: the sum of small decisions grouped or diluted in general patterns on the drawing.

That double articulation, between the general formation of large clouds of shape and color, and the individuality of gesture, is the basis for the musicality of Ding Yi’s painting. It is difficult to word it more precisely than the artist himself: “Crosses lined up close together in a kind of rational way, exploring the relationship between superficiality and space in painting. The distribution of colored lines or fragmentary shapes makes the space of the painted surface produce a richer randomness in a limited, constant relationship.” ^[5]

As several of Ding Yi’s critics have pointed out, it is essential to abandon any temptation of exoticization, culturalism, or metaphysical meaning, face to this way. The marks of Ding Yi’s painting elude any transcendental writing interpretation. They have nothing to do with the “calligraphy” traditional concept that western observers might project in their claim to assign an exotic and nativist value to Asian contemporary art. The blend of his asterisk crossing-outs barely manages to draw the Chinese sign for rice in the most ambiguous way. ^[6] This painting’s connection with writing is not the inscription of a signifier. We should rather concur with Carol Yinghua Lu on the image that Ding Yi’s entire creation works as a kind of “long-term ‘writing’ that uses the ‘cross’ as typography, where ‘writing’ and ‘repetition’ are the form and significance of this new ‘style’.” ^[7] Each painting is posed as one moment in a game between codes and possibilities among thousands of others. It is presented as the combinatorics of referentless signifiers; that is to say, a catalog within a range of options that Ding Yi set by choosing to carry out a process of inscriptions without a cultural or personal definition whatsoever. Ding Yi’s writing is a tactic that forces us to confront the paintings as a singularity expressed in the painting as sheer immanence.

(…) I wanted to paint something with absolutely no metaphor: something without any injection of personal experience. I wanted to cut the bond between the painting and traditional cultural metaphors and create something completely unfamiliar.

(…) all this to ensure that there would be no metaphorical meaning within my works. ^[8]

Ding Yi’s most recent paintings are indeed the outcome of a long refinement and transformation process already going for more than three decades -since he painted his cruciform signs on three color bands, to create Appearance of Crosses I, in 1988, until the cross clusters which, distributed in diagonal agglomerations, use to populate his early 2020 paintings. Most significant is the connection of a painting with its congeners; how each of Ding Yi’s paintings claims, like a series of ghosts and propositions, other possible versions of the series. Because of this binding seriality, every singularity becomes a swarm of variants, made out of other balances of agglomerations and voids, patterns and rhythms, repetitions, colors, and exceptions. Works aimed at the eye and body do not set another discursive field, which is not about a multiplicity of allusions and analogies since they are laid out by patterns marked by the dialogue between a system vocation and thousands of intuitive decisions. Anomalous galaxies lacking curves or rotation signs cross, like the tail of comets, the visual surface with lights and shadows -in diagonal and, sometimes vertical and horizontal shafts- above the green, black, and maroon backgrounds. Circuit patterns, signal embroideries, or skin rashes. Lights that suggest electrical circuits, night urban reflections, or crystals seen under the microscope. Painting, all in all, is done out of gushes of stimulus and activity, where the artist consistently works to ensure that the entire work becomes a focal point so as to remove a dominant fragment from the composition. ^[9] As Shane McCausland points out, agglomerations provoke the experience of “looking at a slow-motion film”, akin to the choreography of the “reader/handler” reviewing a rolled book. ^[10]

It is true that, at least in two moments of such trajectory, his works have had an internalized referent: the use of grid or tartan printed canvas, as the substratum of his painting, by way of a banal, daily, and ubiquitous substrate to be transformed by the pigment, ^[11] and the claim to incorporate, through fluorescent colors, the excitement of Shanghái’s new urban landscape, triggered by luminaries and screens among the buildings and avenues ^[12] Both the industrial grid structure and the fascination for Shanghái’s aestheticization as a showcase of modernization in China were incorporated into his vocabulary, without ever allowing it to become a thematic order. Ding Yi’s merit was to persevere in developing the potential of a primary and elemental shape, the area marked by crosses and asterisks, to deploy a logical progression and put the world that paintings create above, rather than the data they have incorporated.

However, these data expose the degree to which Ding Yi’s painting is an expression of modernization. It is no coincidence that there are few artists of the turn of the century who have adopted, as much as Ding Yi, an autonomous logic, a painting that bets its visual development (or “formal”, as they say) on the chronicle of successive, staggering changes, marked by specific denials and concrete discoveries, that create a trajectory as much or more significant than the individual work. I cannot think of a similar case (apart from the Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu) inhabiting a similar neo-modernist utopia. Both pose an interpretation dilemma: is the swan song of modernism, which has found an old periphery and its genealogies, a way to prolong its agony, kind of a post history? Or is it, on the contrary, the indication that the idea of a painting based on insistence and restriction and understood as self-criticism can find non-exhausted veins and, therefore, extend itself to a consequent future? Anyway, the assertiveness of cases like Ding Yi’s, suggests the way that abstraction persists in serving as a double dialogic of experience, modernization, as its energy and, hence, its more than linear path, poses a spiral that is not alien to history’s decentering.

In any case, the pleasure caused by Din Yi’s painting directly relates to its shape’s reinvention and expansion. Its galaxies of strokes -though anomalous because they lack the spiral forms that derive from the rotation of celestial bodies- traverse the vertical and diagonal eyes of darkness made out of greens, blacks, and maroons, into something that, despite the arbitrariness, may be called an image of thought. Lacking a referent and not being able to be contained solely as a flat object, this kind of painting has to, at one time or another, offer itself as an object of reflection, as an image proposal of the processes that make us as subjects. It is possible to think of the constant diagramming effect of concepts and ideas as an experience also defined by positions and displacements. In its perfidious abstraction, a painting such as Ding Yi’s, is composed of lightings and disaggregations, approaches to order and chaos, shapes, and scatterings, which the observer experiences, not only as a space of representation and deepness, but as a field of forces, events, and condensations. Lacking a referent, when expressing entirely as an artifact (constantly marked in a manual way as a product and the result of manufacturing), it refers back not so much to the world but the very shape of experience.

Not in vain, when Deleuze and Guattari wanted to present their idea that there needed to be a “Plane of immanence” (“the image of thought, the image that you give yourself of what thinking, making use of thought, orienting yourself in thought, means” ^[13]) as a condition for creating concepts, they automatically tended to posit a variety of artistic referents. If the “plane of immanence” had to be sort of a “desert”, where concepts multiplied without splitting, or a “plateau”, it was evident that it could also be “artistically produced”, in cases such as the art of Tinguely machines, or the history of portrait. ^[14]In the endless progression of his groupings, disjunctions, overlays, flow, and effacement, Ding Yi’s crossing-outs stimulate the capture of constant construction and deconstruction, which is the very experience of doing and undoing the world in our imagination and discourse. The painter is not far from that intuition for, in an interesting enough text on Frank Stella, Ding Yi dared to call “rationality” what underlies the “pictorial structure”:

No matter how abstract a work of art is, its foundation is inseparable from reason. Even with the Expressionist painters, their initial ideas were rooted in reason and gradually moved towards sensuality. Rationality can be understood as a kind of pictorial structure, that is, the ability to control chrysalis on of the painting experience, whose abilities are based on the foundation of human reason. ^[15]

Because of this proximity between painting and reasoning, imagining, and doing, Because of this proximity between painting and reasoning, imagining and doing, it is so notorious that skepticism is conspicuous by its absence in Ding Yi’s painting. In a time when global culture is constantly disturbed by the imaginary of disaster, even in its escapism variants, it is intriguing to see an artist who does not look like hosting a moment of doubt or has not made of doubt his perpetual thematic. Despite rising from a constant process of collapse and self-criticism, few contemporary works present themselves so free of neurotic folds and existential doubts as much as this Chinese master’s painting. There is refulgent and even disturbing security in how his small strikeouts writing produces and undoes the world’s moorings. It is there, in that crystal clear optimism, where the kind of foreignness that looks for our contagion and capture lodges today.

^[1] Tony Godfrey and Kaimei Wang, Ding Yi, London, Lund Humphries, 2020, p. 74

^[2] (…) Ding Yi feels the stimulation of Chinese society and the urge to reflect this dynamic time with new imagery, imagery that in his worlds ‘might be able to preserve some kind of cultural ambition for the future.” (106)

^[3] Ding Yi, “Deconstructing the Abstract” (2008) https://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/1046.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Godfrey y Yang, op. cit., p. 83.

^[7] Carol Yinghua Lu, “The Cross Style—A Retrospective Interpretation of Ding Yi’s Creative Journey”, en: Ding Yi. The Cross-Style, Chongqing, Long Museum Chongqing, 2020, p. 111

^[8] “A Ding Yi interview by Mathieu Boryseviczin” (2013), quoted by: Carol Yinghua Lu, op. cit, p. 59.

^[9] He Jing, “A Conversation with ding Yi: In quest of a New Spirit in Painting”, in Ding Yi + x, Shanghai, Shangart 2018, p. 25

^[10] Shane McCausland, “The Reception of Ding Yi and the Framework of Chinese Art History”, in Ding Yi: What´s Left to Appear, Shanghai, Long Museum 2015, p. 102.

^[11] Godfrey y Yang, op. cit., p. 61.

^[12] Ibid., p. 71. It is striking that, besides his admiration for Maurice Utrillo’s and Zao Wo Ki’s urban landscapes (which defined the beginnings of his painting, in the 1980s), Ding Yi attributes his interest in the way his art reflects on the urban esthetics to encountering the French Canadian historian, Serge Guilbaut, in 1998, who challenged him about the relationship between art, city and time. See Ding Yi. The Cross-Style, p. 77 y 226. This thought was embodied in Ding Yi’s 2009 statement “Deconstructing the Abstract”: “There must inevitably be some relationship between the new movements of city expansion, which symbolise nationalisation, and new art and new times. How does everybody’s existence make this period in the history of the city leave traces of its times? How, can one record, from a macro standpoint, the boastfulness, the superficiality, the chaos, the disorder, and the stimuli of city life (…)?”, Ding Yi, “Deconstructing the Abstract”, cit.

^[13] Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari, ¿Qué es la filosofía?, Barcelona, Anagrama, col. Argumentos, 1993, p. 41

^[14] Ibid., p. 40, 58.

^[15] “Ding Yi on Frank Stella”, en: Ding Yi. The Cross-Style, p. 371-373.

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