The Hyper-Paredolian Ding Yi at Timothy Taylor, London, 19 May – 24 June 2017.

http://www.timothytaylor.com/artists/ding-yi/

Ding Yi, now in his 50’s, is one of the most established Chinese painters, but does not conform to the expressionist or  pop-inspired approaches which often seems to dominate the category, at least at auction. Rather, he has been painting abstracts using the cross – both ‘x’ and ‘+’ – as his sole content since 1988. The crosses’ origins lie in the most basic marks in offset printing (Ding’s student job was in the printing industry). That morphed into an interest in textiles – much of Ding’s late 90’s work was painted onto Paisley tartan, nodding to its import history in China.  Over those three decades Ding has altered almost everything – ground, medium, colour, scale, regularity, inflection – but all his works have been called Appearance of Crosses. That title suggests a façade, a field of sense data, and site of mutable interpretation: they may appear like crosses, but what are they really?

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