Ding Yi: Constellations

Opening
on Saturday, September 13, 2025, from 5pm to 9pm
in presence of the artist

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog.

Galerie Karsten Greve is pleased to present Constellations, a solo exhibition of Ding Yi, major figure of the contemporary Chinese abstraction. The gallery has been working with the artist since 2006, maintaining a longstanding and ongoing collaboration for nearly two decades. Widely represented in major international institutions, Ding Yi beneficiates from critical and institutional recognition through numerous exhibitions worldwide. Since the late 1980s, he has been developing a rigorous and singular body of work centered around a single motif: the cross. The exhibition brings together a selection of recent works across a wide variety of media, introducing the star as a new variation in his cruciform vocabulary.

Repeated tirelessly since the beginning of his Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, the cross appears in various forms, like an infinite tapestry woven point by point, unfolding across each canvas with precision and consistency. Ding Yi explores the orthonormal sign in a continual quest for its geometric stability and its ability to generate meaning without bearing any in itself. As he often reminds us: “The cross means nothing and contains, at the same time, a multitude of things.”

His visual language evokes the codes of printing, night constellations, or the networks of a city seen from above. Shanghai, where he lives, pulses throughout his work like an underground rhythm, with its lights, its tempo and its urban density. Perception lies at the heart of his approach: without narrative or focal point, his canvases envelop the viewer in a dense, hypnotic visual weave where any attempt at interpretation dissolves into pure sensation. The term appearance suggests this active seeing, this slow vibration that emerges from the motif.

A significant shift in his work occurred in 2022, during a residency and exhibition in Lhasa, Tibet. Over thirty years after a first journey in 1989, which coincided with the beginning of the Appearance of Crosses series, the artist “returned to the origins.” Far from the bustle of the megacity, Ding Yi discovered a different temporality, another relationship to space and the sacred. For the first time, he experimented with using blue as the dominant color, inspired by the vast skies that stretch over the roof of the world. He worked on handmade Tibetan paper, whose irregular texture provided a living surface for his gestures. Most notably, he introduced a new symbol into his visual grammar: the star. This hybrid form, between cross and celestial body, evokes constellations as much as the vajra, a sacred symbol in Buddhism. Through this new presence, his recent work opens up to a more spiritual, almost ritualistic dimension.

His strict formal language is enriched by a wide range of materials and supports. Canvases, wooden panels, handmade papers…their textures and irregularities influence the composition. At times, the artist applies up to twenty layers of paint before incising or placing the crosses; elsewhere, he works with chalk, charcoal, fluorescent or metallic pigments, using stencils and stamps.

More than a pictorial syntax, Ding Yi offers an intense sensory experience, an invitation to surrender to the rhythm of the sign, where each viewer may trace their own constellation. “Don’t look for the meaning of the image. Look, feel, observe for yourself.”

Born in 1962, Ding Yi lives and works in Shanghai. He earned his first diploma from the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute in 1983 and a second from the Fine Arts Department of Shanghai University in 1990. Internationally acclaimed, he has participated in several biennials, including the Venice Biennale (1993), the Yokohama Triennale (2001), the Guangzhou Biennale (2002), the Shanghai Biennale (2006), and the Busan Biennale (2016). He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art (China, 2023), the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai (2011), and the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, Italy (2008). He has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao (2017 and 2018), as well as at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris (2015). His works are held in major institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the MoCA Shanghai, the UBS Art Collection in Zurich, and the British Museum in London. Since 2005, Ding Yi has been a professor of art at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.