DING YI

Ding Yi began to work on this series around 1988, motivated by doubts and reflections on urbanisation. Later, he became interested in how civilisation has evolved and our position as subjects in the world. On the other hand, his most recent concern focuses on the understanding and expression of light and the elements that compose the universe.

The technical work of Ding Yi is based on precision, detail, and meticulousness. These characteristics are developed from neat brush handling and freehand strokes of pure lines, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, and intersections generated between them on a wooden surface. Another critical tool for the visual result in some of his works is using a gouge (an instrument used in wood carving), which reveals, at various points of the piece, the layers of paint of different colours that compose them. The objective, as described by the artist himself, is to make paintings that don’t look like paintings, making art and its creation process a personal system.

This is the first time that an exhibition of the Chinese artist has been presented in Latin America. The exhibit’s name comes from a homonymous text developed by the critic, curator, and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina, especially for a publication that comes along with this exhibition. Anomalous Galaxies refer to patterns of crosses that in the distance reveal something similar to celestial bodies inside a universe. Although they are galaxies that lack spiral forms, they are offered as reflections on a panoramic vision of everything that shapes us as subjects.

The diversity and variations of bodies or clouds, as Medina calls them, that we find in each of his works, belong to a whole; however, they don’t lose their relevance—as isolated objects—since each one is constructed based on gestures with a specific rational order and that, since there is no rule of interpretation, can present multiple possibilities. This is how a double articulation is achieved in Ding Yi’s work.

Ding Yi’s works conjure energetic and luminous fields; they are chaos and order. A constant of variations scattered on a surface that constantly refer to the relationship between the singular and the multitude. His paintings are agglomerations and dispersions about energy interpretation that activate a particular visual exercise, where the immediate effect that one has when confronted with the work is what matters.