Ding Yi

Starting from the 1980s, the Chinese abstract painter Ding Yi (Shanghai, 1962) produced paintings and drawings on various supports, from canvas to cardboard, from ready-made fabrics to furniture, using different artistic media such as oil, acrylic, charcoal and pen. From the 1980s Ding Yi set out to find his own pictorial language, which is revealed in the choice of the simple character “+” (and its variant “x”) as synonyms of a mental structure as well as a pictorial expression which translates the essence of things. The “+” is the symbol of simplicity and self-discipline, a gesture which the artist meticulously and with constancy of heart repeats every day in his studio. The works succeeding 1997 may be seen as displaying Din Yi’s departure from an exclusively inner world to a closer observation of the world around him. He looks at every smallest facet of Shanghai, recording all the sudden changes in the life of this metropolis par excellence. The fluo rescent and metallic colors he recently started using express the noise, the chaos, the turmoil, but also the incentives and potentialities arising from that “contemporary” as well as "futuristic" environment.

Catalogue: texts by Cao Weijun, Magdalena Kröner and Gianfranco Maraniello.

Ding Yi
Kurator: Gianfranco Maraniello