Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection @ Mostyn Gallery
– Reviewed

“Opportunities to engage with names other than the movement’s usual suspects are all too rare.” Mike Pinnington on a close encounter with the geometric abstraction of Ding Yi… 

When we think about abstraction – its big hitters, various trajectories, history – it’s frequently, perhaps even exclusively, through a white, Western lens.

And, certainly, while it emerged out of movements whose epicentres we would unequivocally call European – the cubism of Braque and Picasso, for instance – like all exciting, epoch-defining ideas, it would spread, germ-like, to become global in its reach. Beyond continental Europe, new translations and interpretations of abstraction would, and continue to, emerge.

Despite this, far too few chapters of its story have been explored in sufficient detail outside of its founding canon. And, during a period in which, it seems (to me at least) that we are hardly swimming in exhibitions celebrating and exploring the movement, the opportunities to discover and engage with names other than the usual suspects diminish correspondingly.

It was with some enthusiasm, then, that I approached Mostyn Gallery’s staging of Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection, a survey show of the eponymous Chinese geometric abstract artist. His work is marked, says Ding, by a blend of Western formal aesthetics and Eastern philosophy. This is but one such binary in a practice that covers a period littered with them: the fall of Soviet Communism and the rupture of the so-called American Dream; tradition and innovation; reality and abstraction; the technological and the human.

Each work here, representative of four decade’s worth of experiments with process-based techniques, falls under the banner Appearance of Crosses, with only the date of their making to differentiate them. The ongoing series is characterised by the repeated use of a cross motif (x and +), a system developed during a period of study in Chinese ink painting that Ding undertook in the late 1980s which perseveres into the present day. If this sounds restrictive, the results suggest otherwise, with the cross merely the starting point on a journey of exploration and mark-making resulting in what the artist refers to as representations of ‘spirit’.

It’s difficult also, however, not to observe that Ding Yi’s brand of geometric abstraction has coincided with and therefore responded to, explicitly or otherwise, huge socio-political shifts, emergent technologies and no shortage of local and global crises. In the tradition of abstraction, with no representation intended, these works nevertheless hint, imply and suggest. In their intricate surfaces we see flags, constellations, heat maps, the sea and the night sky, pixelated territories. Despite the adherence to his chosen method, the works differ markedly, even when demonstrably part of the same oeuvre.

He has said that he “wanted to make painting unlike painting”. And many of the works here have the feel of objects, emerging as they do from the wall; others are mounted on multi-sided structures, meaning that as we view one painting, we spy the back of another. Owing to Ding’s cross technique, at first glance, some could easily be confused for large-scale cross-stitch patterns, as if produced by a contemporary of Anni Albers at the Bauhaus. Only when standing as closely as possible to them (without giving the invigilator a heart attack) can you confirm that they are in fact acrylic, coloured pencil, or a combination of the two. It all makes for a richly textured experience.

A minor gripe, however, is that this show is a slightly watered down version of the artist’s major institutional survey in France last year; the number of works that have made the journey to Wales is too few, making for what feels a bit of a patchwork in places as opposed to fleshed out sections speaking to Ding’s evolution. Larger clusters of paintings per period would no doubt have been beneficial to reception and understanding.

This presentation, then, feels more tantalising glimpse than full picture, leaving us to wonder at the larger scale exhibition we might have had. But better that we have it in the first place than not to have had it at all. There is a prevalent argument that our times – fraught as they are – demand a less opaque, more literal art. But the best of abstraction has always provided artists and audiences alike with the potential to plot new pathways, to imagine new worlds through colour and line. Ding Yi is a wonderful addition to my long-term love affair with the movement. I’m grateful for the irl introduction.

Mike Pinnington

Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection continues at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, until 31 May

Images: Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection, Mostyn Gallery installation © Rob Battersby