Alfredo Cramerotti maps meaning to method in artist Ding Yi’s practice

In the sterile environs of the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium at Château La Coste, Chinese artist Ding Yi’s works seem to pop off the walls, their bold swathes of red, blue and yellow at odds with the gently undulating landscape of the 600-acre vineyard and art complex in southeastern France. Prediction and Retrospection is the first significant institutional survey of the geometric abstractionist’s work in Europe. Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, director of Media Majlis at Northwestern Qatar, the exhibition showcases around 30 works on canvas, wood and paper and is on view from July 3 - September 15, 2024. STIR’s conversation with Cramerotti highlights the significance of presenting a large body of Ding Yi’s work in conversation with the European institutional art scene.

Ding Yi’s works across a period of 40 years are built on two iterations of a cross-like symbol: x and +. These symbols multiply to form intricately intersected patterns in a series of nonrepresentational paintings. All the works carry the same title—Appearance of Crosses—and are numbered by year and month, with decades of practice organised across a single series.

The repetitive symbols, combined with the continuous evolution of colour, materials and techniques, form my personal artistic language. Ding Yi, artist

Ding Yi has worked through tumultuous periods in China, his early years marked by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and later, by China’s emergence as a manufacturing hub for global conglomerates. “Both ‘+’ and ‘x’ are symbolic tools. Since the 1980s, I have been reflecting on the entire social structure and the abstraction of art. I hope my work can depart from the mainstream ideological level and present a logic that connects with the larger reality of our times. I use the grid as an initial framework to evolve the meaningless symbols of ‘+’ and ‘x’ into the strokes of my creation,” the artist said about his work in a response to STIR.

While Ding Yi’s works are abstract, given over to complex choreographies of repetitive crosses, the artist does use his work to reflect on changes in Chinese society – mapping these developments to stylistic elements. He said, “It is a continuous evolution, development and conflict, with new perspectives and ways of thinking constantly emerging. The repetitive symbols, combined with the continuous evolution of colour, materials and techniques, form my personal artistic language…[this allows] my works to connect with the history and space of this era through constant innovation.”

The Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium at Château La Coste, the renowned Brazilian architect’s final project, is a notoriously challenging exhibition space with its curved design, devoid of L-shaped corners. Cramerotti enjoyed working with the architecture of the space, using black floor-to-ceiling bars that dot the space to place the works. As multi-centred compositions which invite the viewer’s gaze to drift across the canvas instead of looking at fixed centres, Ding Yi’s works complicate singular ways of seeing. He said, “This form relates to the rich spiritual connotations my work aims to express. I hope my works can accommodate and represent different regional cultures, individual and collective emotions, social changes and even transcendental cosmology and spiritual landscapes.”

Tap the cover to watch the full conversation.

Video script by Harshali Pagare