Shenzhen MOCAUP to Host Ding Yi: Cross Galaxy

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (“SZ MOCAUP”) announces the presentation of an exhibition, titled “Ding Yi: Cross Galaxy”, to be held from August 16 to October 15, 2023. The exhibition breaks the linear narrative of time, selecting more than 60 classic works from Ding Yi’s “Cross” series since the 1980s, cutting into the artist’s creation of more than 30 years from different perspectives. New paintings, installations and digital artworks created by Ding Yi especially for Shenzhen will also be presented.

Ding Yi is well known as a geometric abstract artist who uses the character “+” and grids. These symbols, reminiscent of mathematical formulas, have become an aesthetic label for Ding Yi’s art over the past 30 years.

His abstract art was born in 1988. The 1980s of Chinese contemporary art was a huge laboratory in which all kinds of avant-garde and experimental art forms emerged, riding the wave of reform and opening-up policies. Witnessing a break with the past and a subversion of values in which newness itself is considered a virtue, Ding Yi distanced himself from the frenzy. He began to search for trivial things that are small, humble, and insignificant, and difficult to be regarded as art materials. He found the symbols “x” and “+”, which are familiar to the public but do not carry specific meaning. These symbols can be seen as a rejection of the expression of value-centeredness and the conventions that claim it.

Ding Yi’s solo exhibition, curated by Yongwoo Lee, is like a kind of autobiography that shows the entire process of Ding Yi’s art over the past 35 years, from its beginning to the present. Rather than the usual chronological way of presenting his work, this exhibition is curated under the chapters of “Meaning and Meaninglessness”, “Dwelling and Drifting”, “Figurative Abstraction” and “Living Beings”. Beyond the tableau of “densely patterned paintings”, the exhibition showcases a big change in his work in which the beauty of negative space gradually emerges. In particular, a fan suspended in the air made in the shape of a “+” is introduced, expanding the three-dimensional expression of “x” that he showed in his past sculptures and installation works. Ding Yi’s art, which started from the cross sign, is thus a cross galaxy and an epic where life breathes.