Cross Purposes

By Sammi Gale

Standing close to a work by Ding Yi, the network of crosses seems to flicker like phosphenes, the sparks that appear when you close your eyes. For nearly four decades, Ding has painted tiny, meticulous, unwavering crosses, each one a unit of precision and patience. They began in the late 1980s, when the artist’s home city Shanghai was reconfiguring itself into the hypermodern grid of lit high-rises we now recognise, and when abstraction in China was still, in many ways, an act of quiet rebellion. Ding’s new visual language was a reaction to the propaganda of Socialist Realism, or xuanchuanhua, and, later, to the art market’s hunger for figurative, politically loaded work. His pluses and crosses became a kind of meditation: philosophical, practical, disciplined. But what does repetition amount to after so long — a transcendent climb or just the steady hum of habit? Maybe, as Ding’s work seems to suggest, the two are the same thing.

In The Road to Heaven, his exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Ding Yi takes this language of crosses and lattices — his lifelong syntax — and raises it to another plane. New relief paintings, carved in basswood, rise and fall like the sacred Hengduan Mountains of Yunnan, a region whose history, cosmology and inhabitants, the Naxi people, have deeply informed the series. A sacred scroll, used in funerary rites to guide the soul through its passage to the afterlife, gives the exhibition its title.

'psychedelic landscape and poppy static'

Ding’s engagement with Dongba, the Naxi’s system of shamanism, has seen him filtering the worldview through his own trademark abstraction, allowing the works to act as a lens rather than hulking pronouncements. The planes of colour skip between psychedelic landscape and poppy static. It’s as if the artist’s orderly universe has opened a hatch onto some cosmic, swinging mysticism, but we haven’t quite stepped through. 

Ding has referred to this stage of his career as ‘looking up’: a turn toward the spiritual, the irrational, the unknowable. But perhaps it’s less about finding faith than testing it — seeing whether a lifetime of ordered marks can still produce surprise, or whether expansive spiritual practices can be contained by the simple logic of a grid. The X, austere and neutral, can take on multiple meanings, from a remnant of the printing factory where Ding worked as a boy to a fork in the road. Ever-wavering, it becomes a kind of cultural weathervane, spinning with the currents around it.

'the tartan-like patterns of earlier works now seem to resemble QR codes'

Ding Yi is sixty-three now. He has lived through China’s transformations, from collectivism to consumerism, from scarcity to spectacle. As his paintings have weathered those same shifts, the tartan-like patterns of earlier works now seem to resemble QR codes. The crosses, multiplied thousands of times, suggest both the circuitry of the digital age and the prayer beads of a monk. In an age when images must shout to be seen, his quiet rigour and resistance to closure feels radical. As the curator Cui Cancan writes, his ‘winding path has no terminus.’ The point is not to arrive but to continue. The grid, once a mainstay of modernist detachment, becomes here a form of connection — between the artist and his materials, between the viewer and far-off mountains.

Like the two axes of the artist’s cross, any extension heavenwards is always counterbalanced by that horizontal line, grounding the work in the everyday. Within the dense accumulation of marks, you sense the human pulse: a road to heaven, perhaps. But also just a steady way of walking the earth.