Ding Yi

Ding Yi (Chinese: 丁㇠; born 1962) is a Chinese contemporary artist currently based in Shanghai. A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being.

Early life Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, with a vision to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings that resembled plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures —rigorously precise compositions formed through the repetition of the cross.

Career Ding Yi's enduring method of incorporating crosses into his work emerged in the late 1980s. He executed a series of painting experiments called Appearance of Crosses, in which the artist adopted the shapes of x and + as a recurring motif with the intention of combining painting and design into a single form of expression. The cross, whether a + or an x, is a motif that the artist has declared as a formal mark without meaning, while the context of this work is the industrial-paced development of the urban environment in post-socialist China. His perennial idiom —-- the grid —-- speaks to a context in place and time, through its association with the frenetic communications networks and distinctive fluorescence of the contemporary city.

Style The majority of his work features repetitions of the sign superimposed in different layers, colors, and rotations; the tiny, manually painted symbols cover the entire surface of large canvases, requiring a painstaking amount of precision and technical skill. By applying extremely rational design elements, Ding sought to "make painting that was not like painting," and for the past thirty years he has exclusively and relentlessly executed abstract paintings with shapes of small cross. The majority of his work features repetitions of the plus sign superimposed in different layers, colors, and rotations; the tiny, manually painted symbols cover the entire surface of large canvases, requiring a painstaking amount of precision and technical skill. University of Sydney Art Collection, Australia CDU Art Collection, Australia Stichting Van Tuyckom Foundation, Brussels, Belgium Chinese Modern Art Foundation, Ghent, Belgium Centre Pompidou, Paris, France DSL Collection, Paris, France Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, Berlin, Germany The City of Hamburg Germany, Hamburg, Germany Yuz Foundation, Jakarta, Indonesia Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan Morioka City Library, Morioka, Japan Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongju, Korea The British Museum, London, UK Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK Fosun Foundation, New York, USA The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA UBS Art Collection, Zurich, Switzerland Taikang Collection, Beijing, China The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing, China A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, Chengdu, China Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China By Art Matters, Hangzhou, China K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, China M+ Collection, Hong Kong, China Jebum-gang Art Center, Lhasa, China Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China Huamao Museum of Art Education, Ningbo, China Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China Tag Art Museum, Qingdao, China ASE Foundation, Shanghai, China China Art Museum (former Shanghai Art Museum), Shanghai, China Long Museum, Shanghai, China MOCA Shanghai, China Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China Shanghai Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China Star Museum, Shanghai, China Tank Shanghai, China Z-art Center, Shanghai, China Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen, China He Art Museum, Shunde, China Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China Xi'an Art Museum, Xi'an, China Yitiao Art Foundation, Hangzhou, China