Events

Ikon Gallery

Ding Yi: The Appearance of Crosses

23 November – 22 January 2006

Venue: Ikon Gallery, Oozells Square
www.ikon-gallery.co.uk

Ikon presents the first UK exhibition of work by Shanghai-based Chinese artist Ding Yi.

Consisting of around twenty works, dated from c.1990, the exhibition follows the development of his career since he became expressly preoccupied with simple cross motifs ‘x’ and ‘+’. Ding Yi’s practice focuses on a constant use of grid structures, articulated by the intersection of lines at 90 and 45 degrees, painted in various colours. Early works were hard-edged through the use of masking tape which gave the work a seamless quality. Acrylic on canvas, they gave way to a practice that involves a range of non-art materials and a more informal style. Ding Yi now paints by hand slowly criss-crossing the surfaces of his paintings without taking any short cuts.

By the late 1990s, Ding Yi moved to directly using tartan fabric instead of plain canvas. His mark-making resonates with the Scottish patterns, his applied colours playing off those in the cloth left exposed. In the abstract series Appearance of Crosses ’97 the repetition of his craft-like activity is superimposed on that of the industrial weaving process. The result is as aesthetically rich as it is conceptually satisfying.

Crosses are often the means by which a precise location is indicated. In Ding Yi’s work they take on an existentialist significance, as mantra-like gestures they reiterate the fact that the artist physically “was there”. Without being particularly religious, he acknowledges the influence of Buddhism, especially in his aspiration to simplicity and the blurring of boundaries. Yet, at the same time, Ding Yi asserts the metropolitan nature of his work, its increasingly bright colours being inspired by the neon quality of Shanghai at night.

His new work is at once a kind of a meditation and a contemporary Chinese rejoinder to Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, beautiful and thoughtful, quite unlike any other painting being made today. Seen here, in the context of earlier series, it makes an interesting case for the continuing relevance of abstraction in contemporary art.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an essay by Hou Hanru, published in collaboration with Shanghart, Shanghai. Exhibition supported by Visiting Arts and Urban Fusion.