DING Yi’s (Shanghai 1962) career includes studies in decorative arts at the Shanghai School of Arts & Crafts, a position as a designer in a toy factory, and studies in traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University. The diversity of this background has been reflected, in his work, in the simultaneous coexistence of a high degree of apparent mechanization, repetition and precision, along with a creative impulse towards novelty and formal experimentation.

Though as a student he already favored abstraction, it was in 1988, when he began the infinite series called Appearance of Crosses, in which he started to develop a unique visual language that contradicted the typical formats of Chinese painting of that time. Using the cross as a formal referent, sometimes emptied from meaning, and sometimes associated with negation, Ding Yi established a distance from expression and the sentiment that predominated in his artistic environment. His artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and installation, and is circumscribed by the idea of promoting the autonomy of the artistic field beyond politics and history.