How Chinese abstract artist Ding Yi turned crosses from a symbol of ‘criticism and denial’ into a tool of expression, as seen in Shenzhen retrospective

The tricolour background is further divided by black lines into a uniform grid of 90 squares, each with a plus sign inside just short of touching the edges.

In the late 1980s, after studying design as an undergraduate, Ding was sailing through a master’s degree in Chinese painting which mainly required students to mimic the works of elderly professors.

Spurred by the wind of change in the era that followed the launch of China’s post-1978 reform and opening up, he felt drawn to international abstract art movements, and settled on the universal symbols of x and + as his visual vocabulary.

He changed his first name in 1986 from Rong, meaning prosperous, to Yi, a Chinese character written in one simple stroke which can mean either one or two, and which goes much better with the simplicity and openness of his art.

Now represented internationally by four art galleries, Ding says he was the odd one out among his fellow students.

Abstraction was not a mainstream choice at the time; most of his fellow students were turning the official, propagandistic style of Socialist realism on its head in what became known as the cynical realism movement, or appropriating cultural icons as “political pop”.

He, too, had once allowed the intense feelings of the time to show in his paintings. Next to the deliberate flatness of Appearance of Crosses I are two 1985-6 oil paintings, called Breaking the Sacrifice and Taboo, which are covered in crosses and blank squares in rough, furious brushstrokes against a stormy backdrop.

The artist, wearing his signature round glasses, his black hair in a bob, explains in Shenzhen that those earlier crosses were the products of an era of liberation after the Cultural Revolution.

“To us, the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution, crosses meant only one thing – criticism and denial. They were everywhere.”

But later, as other young artists filled their canvases with political meaning, Ding crossed out memory and context in his paintings and turned the symbols of denial into new tools.

To make something entirely new would require a steadfast and rational approach to abstraction that did not refer to real-life objects, a way of making art that didn’t look like art, and the wiping away of traditional baggage, he decided.

“That’s why, in the 1988 painting, I used the three primary colours. I wanted to say: ‘Let’s start from scratch!’” he says.

He kept his word for about 10 years, making “pure” abstractions that conflate art and design. Those works feature repetitive rows of plus signs and x’s – and asterisks where the two symbols cross – spread evenly across their canvases with no focal point or hierarchy, like the pattern of the tartan fabric that he would sometimes paint on.

Eventually, Ding decided to allow himself to make explicit references to the world around him.

“A new phase of the cross series began in the late 1990s. People kept asking me why my art didn’t reflect the changes in Shanghai. And so I started to make a record of the physical changes in the city,” he says.

The new wealth, material abundance and confidence of the time is apparent from the blast of bright hues in the exhibition’s “cityscapes” section. Ding calls them snapshots of his beloved hometown.

The ones showing bright streaks zapping across a dark background, for example, could be night views of Shanghai, the city ablaze in raw energy.

They also hint at broader themes. The “artificial” fluorescent paint that he picked for this phase reflects the strangeness of the time, Ding says.

Among the most eye-catching of the works here is Appearances of Crosses 2008-21, a set of five dazzling red-and-gold square panels arranged to roughly suggest the outline of China.

Unlike the Chinese flag, in which one dominant yellow star is supported by four orderly satellites high up in the red firmament, Ding’s celestial objects look like they are in the Large Hadron Collider.

Four panels are hung in the configuration of a cross, each covered in lines formed of crosses and squares and expanding outwards from the centre. The fifth panel hangs on its own to the left, where the Xinjiang and Tibet regions would be, with lines that converge into a large “x”.

He is increasingly drawn to that part of the world because he has been looking for a universal humanism beyond the values associated with the world’s dominant cultures, including his own, he says.

Since 2021 he has been visiting Tibet, Xinjiang and nearby Qinghai province, as well as making a “pilgrimage” to Mount Everest, he says. The result is a series of new works shown publicly for the first time in the Shenzhen exhibition.

Unlike the rhizomic configuration of his earlier works, these 2023 paintings are strikingly binary. Two different shades of cinnabar red denote heaven and earth, Ding says, the two spheres connected by a shower of shooting stars.

Ding has always denied that his crosses are religious, and continues to maintain the apolitical nature of his art. So why is he connecting these paintings with the two autonomous regions in China that are most often associated with religion and politics?

“With age, I am not so determined to be removed from reality,” he says. The new paintings are not so much about the places themselves but meditations on individuals’ relationship with the collective, and their positions in history, he says.

Another work from 2018 – nearly 10 metres (33ft) across and covering an entire wall – recalls the dots of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s work.

Appearance of Crosses 2018-83 seems to be a monochrome galaxy filled with stars. On closer inspection, it is a giant Go chess board covered in white and black discs placed on top of a grid of crosses made with double lines in pencil.

Beneath that is another layer – faint blue traces of a square grid which, given that it is a work on rice paper, recalls the jiugongge nine-square grid used for practising Chinese calligraphy.

Then there’s the Wind House, a room where ceiling fans covered in painted crosses are spinning, as if filling the air with the symbols.

Obliteration? Or palimpsests of history?

“Ding Yi’s art is about the universal law that is in all of us. The universe began with explosion, followed by expansion with time,” says Gong Yan, director of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, in a symposium held alongside the exhibition’s opening.

“He said he had to start at zero. And he has kept going, while continuing to use the same basic building blocks in new ways. To me, his art incorporates tradition, history and breakthroughs.”

“Ding Yi: Cross Galaxy”, Exhibition Hall A3, Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen, 184 Fuzhong Road, Futian Central District, Shenzhen, China, Tue-Sun, 10am-6pm. Until Oct. 15.