He is an artist who conveys his ideas with a painting language that is understandable to all, at the same time, contemporary and philosophical.

Since the late 1980s, Ding Yi's paintings adopted the Chinese character “＋” and its variant "×" as his primary visual symbols. He considers these meaningless formal symbols as representations of structure and rationality and a kind of pictorial synonym that reflects the essence of things. These works on canvas reflect the urban environment of post-socialist China’s industrial development. All of his paintings are entitled Appearnaces of Crosses and the year in which it was completed. His choice of the title expands on the sign’s potential to imply various kinds of meanings.

Ding Yi wishes the viewer to focus on the colors, the lines, and the structural space of the painting, rather than its possible meaning. In his own words, "Only when people ignore the so-called meaning can they be more open to the new feeling brought by art."

For more than three decades, Ding Yi’s mediums of expression have undergone various transformations, which shifted from paper to canvas, fabric, and board. In the 1990s, many works were done on paper, where the overlaying horizontal and vertical signs showed an ambiguous structure; some even looked like a piece of found fabric. Later on, he began to work directly on the colored grids fabrics. After 2010, Ding Yi's reassessment of the medium steered him to paint colors layer by layer on hardwood panels, where he carved out the rigid and sharp lines to resonate with the upright edges of the space.

Ding Yi's choice of painting materials ranges from oil paints to acrylics, charcoal, chalk, and oil pastels to ballpoint pens and knives.

The color spectrum on his canvas covers a wide range, from the monochrome to all of the perceptible colors, to fluorescence. For some paintings, Ding Yi only applies the monochrome of black, white, and gray; for others, he uses chalk and charcoal to create swaying orange-red grids. In some cases, he favors the symbolic colors of the stock market: red and green; and he often adds fluorescent colors on his canvas, which embodies the texture of the Shanghai metropolis.

Ding Yi extends the “crosses” into his sculptures, installations, architecture, and urban public spaces. Last year, for the UBM Sinoexpo Plaza in Shanghai, Ding Yi created two works using his signature "crosses," and intended for their shapes and materials to resonate with the urban environment. His 2011 public sculpture Appearance of Crosses - Ruyi drew inspiration from traditional Chinese symbols such as Ruyi, the cloud pattern, and xuanji. These cultural elements and their symbolic meanings to his personalized "crosses" are embedded on the surface of the pieces. The works explore the cultural origins of pictorial elements and the possibility of new transformations, extensions, developments, and renewals in contemporary contexts.

Ding Yi

Ding Yi (b. 1962) was born and currently resides in Shanghai. Ding Yi works primarily with "+" and its variant "x" as formal visual signals, above and against the political and social allegories typical of painting in China. He chose this sign in the second half of the 80s as a synonym of structure, rationality and of a pictorial expressiveness that reflects the essence of things. The practice of Ding Yi encompasses painting, sculpture, spatial installation and architecture.

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively at various institutions and galleries, among many others, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York/Bilbao); Daimler Contemporary (Berlin); Centre Pompidou (Paris); Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou); Long Museum (Shanghai); Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai); ShanghART Gallery (Shanghai/Beijing/Singapore); Timothy Taylor Gallery (London/New York); Galerie Karsten Greve (Paris/St.Moritz/Cologne).